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OIRNA'MENTAL (GARD)ENING.
producing a labyrinth without intricacy or variety, and to which
every cross path was an effectual clue.
The style of disposing the materials of a country residence,
was considerably improved by Kent the architect-it was, how-
ever, but a modification of the former practice, which was not
departed from until Brown, adopting nature for his model,
selected the favourable, the beautiful and the striking features of
rural scenery, and studiously congregating them about the
mansion, formed thence a landscape scenery that seemed to be the
work of nature herself, although carefully cherished by the hand
of man. The more scientifically to obtain the end in view, Mr.
Brown sought in the works of the poets and of eminent painters, for
those descriptions and delineations of pictorial beauty,which being
realized in landscape art would become strikingly engaging:
hence the terms picturesque and landscape-gardening are com-
monly applied to such dispositions of the ground, water, trees,
shrubberies, &c. as the painter would prefer as objects wherewith
to compose his picture. The terms at least were of natural
birth, and they point out the chief means by which the transi-
tion was so rapidly made in designs for country residences, in
which the stateliness of former times was superseded by the
simple graces of nature.
As the progress of science is always gradual, it was not to be pre-
sumed that the new manner should be pure and wholly unmixed
with some of the defects of the preceding style: and we
ought therefore to expect that something of the former practice
should be discovered even in the best works of Mr. Brown. There
is indeed much evidence of those trammels, but it may exist
because he could not at once stem the obstructions thrown in his
way, by prejudice and by ignorance, both of which every inno-
vator on public taste has to contend with, and to conquer.
These however cannot abridge the well earned fame of our " great
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