For physic and farces, his equal there scarce is:
His farces are physic, his physic a farce is.
THE RUINED ARCH
Another questionable authority in taste, introduced by Bute to the Princess and her son, was William Chambers, an architect who built himself into no small note. In his youth, as supercargo of a vessel he had travelled as far as China, then a land of fresh wonder, to bring back extravagant notions, set forth in his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, and in a mania for Chinoiseries, which was let loose at Kew. Hence the building of the Pagoda in 1762, of a House of Confucius, and of a mosque, with temples, grottos, and other outlandish erections, most of which have long disappeared. He also built the Observatory where Richmond Lodge came to be demolished. His innovations were not confined to buildings, as appears in Mason’s satire:—
Now to our lawns of dalliance and delight,
Join we the groves of horror and affright.
The architect-gardener declared himself very complacent about the dealings with Nature here carried out. “Originally the ground was one continued dead flat, the soil was in general barren, without either wood or water. With so many disadvantages it was not easy to produce anything even tolerable in gardening; but princely munificence overcame all difficulties. What was once a desert is now an Eden!”
As controller of the works actively pushed on at Kew, Chambers prospered so much as to be knighted, and to buy Whitton Place, near Hounslow, where the third Duke of Argyll, brother and heir of Jeanie Deans’s protector, himself better known as Lord Islay, had established a nursery of exotic trees, which it was his hobby to naturalise in England. On the death of this duke the cream of his collection seems to have been transplanted to Kew, now become a truly royal botanic garden, unsurpassed in England, with a fame that went on growing till Erasmus Darwin was bound to note it in his herbarium of verse.
So sits enthron’d in vegetable pride