rrounded with thick impenetrable
woods.' The taste grew as the century advanced. Now one impulse towards
the new style is said to have come from articles in the _Spectator_ by
Addison and in the _Guardian_ by Pope, ridiculing the old-fashioned mode
of clipping trees, and so forth. Nature, say both, is superior to art,
and the man of genius, as Pope puts it, is the first to perceive that
all art consists of 'imitation and study of nature.' Horace Walpole in
his essay upon gardening remarks a point which may symbolise the
principle. The modern style, he says, sprang from the invention of the
ha-ha by Bridgeman, one of the first landscape gardeners. The 'ha-ha'
meant that the garden, instead of being enclosed by a wall, was laid out
so as to harmonise with the surrounding country, from which it was only
separated by an invisible fence. That is the answer to the problem; is
it not a solecism for a lover of gardens to prefer nature to art? A
garden is essentially a product of art? and supplants the moor and
desert made by unassisted nature. The love of Nature as understood in a
later period, by Byron for example, went to this extreme, in words at
least, and becomes misanthropical in admiring the savage for its own
sake. But the landscape gardener only meant that his art must be in some
sense subordinate to nature; that he must not shut out the wider scenery
but include it in his designs. He was apt to look upon mountains as a
background to parks, as Telford thought that rivers were created to
supply canals. The excellent Gilpin, who became an expounder of what he
calls 'the theory of the picturesque,' travelled on the Wye in the same
year as Gray; and amusingly criticises nature from this point of view.
Nature, he says, works in a cold and singular style of composition, but
has the merit of never falling into 'mannerism.' Nature, that is, is a
sublime landscape gardener whose work has to be accepted, and to whom
the gardener must accommodate himself. A quaint instance of this theory
may be found in the lecture which Henry Tilney in _Mansfield Park_
delivers to Catherine Morland. In Horace Walpole's theory, the evolution
of the ha-ha, means that man and nature, the landowner and the country,
are gradually forming an alliance, and it comes to the same thing
whether one or the other assimilates his opposite.

Briefly, this means one process by which the so-called love of nature
was growing; it meant better roads and inns; the gr