232 LONDON PARKS © GARDENS 
lines.” He imagines that fanciful advocates of landscape 
gardening will object to this as too formal, and be “further 
shocked ” by learning that he hoped they would be kept 
cut and trimmed. Within were to be “ groves in one 
quarter of the area, the other three enriched with flowers 
and shrubs, each disposed in a different manner, to indulge 
the various tastes for regular or irregular gardens.” He 
ends his description by saying : “ A few years hence, when 
the present patches of shrubs shall have become thickets 
—when the present meagre rows of trees shall have 
become an umbrageous avenue—and the children now in 
their nurses’ arms shall have become the parents or grand- 
sires of future generations—this square may serve to 
record, that the Art of Landscape Gardening in the 
beginning of the nineteenth century was not directed 
by whim or caprice, but founded on a due consideration 
of utility as well as beauty, without a bigoted adherence 
to forms and lines, whether straight, or crooked, or 
serpentine.” 
Repton always put forth his ideas in high-sounding 
language, often not so well justified as in the present 
case. The lime-trees have been allowed to grow taller 
than he desired, and yet are not fine trees from having at 
one period been kept trimmed ; but they certainly form an 
attractive addition to the usual design, and looking at 
them, after nearly a hundred years, from the outside, 
where they form a background to the statue, the effect 
in summer is very attractive. 
Bedford Square is on the gardens of the other great 
house—Montagu House, built by the Duke of Montagu. 
Evelyn also notes going to see that. In 1676, “ I dined,” 
he says, “with Mr. Charleton and went to see Mr. 
Montagu’s new palace near Bloomsbury, built by 
