lington. He
helped to lay out Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, with a fresh and surprising
view at every turn; the wandering visitor was introduced, among other
delights, to the Hermitage, the Temple of Venus, the Egyptian pyramid,
St. Augustine's cave (artfully constructed of roots and moss), the Saxon
Temple, the Temple of Bacchus, and Dido's cave. The craze for romantic
gardening, with its illusions of distance, and its ruins and groves,
persisted throughout the eighteenth century. Shenstone's garden at The
Leasowes enjoyed a higher reputation even than his poetry, and it is well
known how he strained his slender means in the effort to outshine his
neighbors. "In time," says Johnson, "his expenses brought clamours about
him that overpowered the lamb's bleat and the linnet's song; and his
groves were haunted by beings very different from fauns and fairies."

The chief of Kent's successors was Launcelot Brown, commonly called
"Capability Brown" from his habit of murmuring to himself, as he gazed on
a tract of land submitted for his diagnosis--"It has capabilities; it has
capabilities." He laid out Kew and Blenheim. Gazing one day on one of
his own made rivers, he exclaimed, with an artist's rapture,--"Thames!
Thames! Thou wilt never forgive me." He certainly imposed himself upon
his own time, and, so far, was a great man. "Mr. Brown," said Richard
Owen Cambridge, "I very earnestly wish that I may die before you." "Why
so?" said Brown with some surprise. "Because," said he, "I should like
to see Heaven before you had improved it." Among the romantic writers
who were bitten by the mania for picturesque improvement were Horace
Walpole and even Sir Walter Scott. Everyone knows how Walpole bought
from Mrs. Chevenix, the toy-shop woman, a little house called "Chopp'd
Straw Hall" which he converted into the baronial splendors of Strawberry
Hill; and how Scott transmitted a mean Tweedside farm, called Clarty
Hole, into the less pretentious glories of Abbotsford.

After the practice came the theory. The painters and landscape-gardeners
were followed by a school of philosophers, who expounded Taste and the
laws of the Picturesque. Some extracts from the work of one of these,
Thomas Whately, whose _Observations on Modern Gardening_ appeared in
1770, will show to what excesses the whole nonsensical business had been
carried. "In wild and romantic scenes," says Whately, "may be introduced
a ruined stone bridge, of which s