It must not be forgotten that, during all this period, or nearly six centuries, parks were common in England. Henry I. (1100 to 1135) had a park at Woodstock, and four centuries later, or during the reign of Henry VII., Holinshed informs us, that large parks or inclosed forest portions, several miles in circumference, were so common, that their number in Kent and Essex alone amounted to upwards of a hundred.
Although these parks were more devoted to the preservation of game and the pleasures of the chase than to any other purpose, their existence was, we conceive, not wholly owing to this cause; but we look upon them as indicating that love of nature and that desire to retain beautiful portions of it as part of a residence, which form the groundwork of the taste for the modern or landscape gardening, since the latter is only an epitome of nature with the charms judiciously heightened by art.
