[24] Nonsuch had its wilderness of ten acres.
[25] Nineteenth Century Magazine, July, 1890.
[26] With regard to this remark, we have to note a certain amount of French influence throughout the reigns of the Jameses and Charleses. Here is Beaumont, "gardener to James II.;" and we hear also of André Mollet, gardener to James I.; also that Charles II. borrowed Le Nôtre to lay out the gardens of Greenwich and St James' Park.
[27] The gardens at Wilton are exceedingly beautiful, and contain noble trees, among which are a group of fine cedars and an ilex beneath which Sir Philip Sidney is supposed to have reclined when he wrote his "Arcadia" here. The Italian garden is one of the most beautiful in England.
[28] Of Berkeley, Evelyn writes: "For the rest the forecourt is noble, so are the stables; and, above all, the gardens, which are incomparable by reason of the inequality of the ground, and a pretty piscina. The holly-hedges on the terrace I advised the planting of."
[29] Houghton was built by Sir R. Walpole, between 1722 and 1738. The garden was laid out in the stiff, formal manner by Eyre, "an imitator of Bridgman," and contained 23 acres. The park contains some fine old beeches. More than 1000 cedars were blown down here in February 1860.
[30] Thomas Whately's "Observations on Modern Gardening," was published in 1770, fifteen years before Walpole's "Essay on Modern Gardening." Gilpin's book "On Picturesque Beauty," though published in part in 1782, belongs really to the second phase of the Landscape School. Shenstone's "Unconnected Thoughts on the Garden" was published in 1764, and is written pretty much from the standpoint of Kent. "An Essay on Design in Gardening," by G. Mason, was published in 1795.
[31] Loudon calls this School "Repton's," the "Gardenesque" School, its characteristic feature being "the display of the beauty of trees and other plants individually."
[32] A candid friend thus writes to Repton: "You may have perceived that I am rather too much inclined to the Price and Knight party, and yet I own to you that I have been often so much disgusted by the affected and technical language of connoisseurship, that I have been sick of pictures for a month, and almost of Nature, when the same jargon was applied to her." (Repton, p. 232.)
[33] "The Praise of Gardens," pp. 185-6.