Horace Walpole's essay On Modern Gardening: John Milton

Introduction Ancient gardens Roman gardens Renaissance gardens John Milton  Sir William Temple William Kent Early 18th century gardens Ha Ha Thomas Whately Landscape Gardens Lancelot 'Capability' Brown 

John Milton

One man, one great man we had, on whom nor education nor custom could impose their prejudices; who, on evil days though fallen, and with darkness and solitude compassed round, judged that the mistaken and fantastic ornaments he had seen in gardens were unworthy of the almighty hand that planted the delights of Paradise. He seems with the prophetic eye of taste (as I have heard taste well defined by the great Lord Chatham, who had a good taste himself in modern gardening, as he showed by his own villas in Enfield Chase and at Hayes) to have conceived, to have foreseen modern gardening; as Lord Bacon announced the discoveries since made by experimental philosophy. The description of Eden is a warmer and more just picture of the present style than Claude Lorraine could have painted from Hagley or Stourhead. The first lines I shall quote exhibit Stourhead on a more magnificent scale:

Thro' Eden went a river large,

Nor chang'd his course, but thro' the shaggy hill,

Pass'd underneath engulfed, for God had thrown

That mountain as his garden-mound, high rais'd

Upon the rapid current- Hagley seems pictured in what follows:

-which thro' veins

Of porous earth with kindly thirst updrawn, Rose a fresh fountain, and with many a nil Water'd the garden-

 

What colouring, what freedom of pencil, what landscape in these lines:

-from that saphire fount the crisped brooks,

Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold.

With mazy error under pendent shades

Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed

Flow'rs worthy of Paradise, which not nice art

In beds and curious knots, but nature boon

Pour'd forth profuse on hill and dale and plain,

Both where the morning sun first warmly smote

The open field, and where the unpierc'd shade

Imbrown'd the noon-tide bow'rs.

- Thus was this place

A happy rural seat of various views

 

Read this transporting your mind the scenes them with the savage

description, paint to that follow, contrast but respectable terror

with which the poet guards the bounds of his Paradise, fenced

-with the champain head

Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides

With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild

Access denied; and overhead upgrew

Insuperable heights of loftiest shade,

Cedar and pine, and fir, and branching palm,

A sylvan scene, and as the ranks ascend,

Shade above shade, a woody theatre

Of stateliest view-

and then recollect that the author of this sublime vision had never seen a glimpse of

anything like what he has imagined, that his favourite ancients had dropped not a hint of such divine scenery, and that the conceits in Italian gardens, and Theobalds and Nonsuch, were the brightest originals that his memory could furnish. His intellectual eye saw a nobler plan, so little did he suffer by the loss of sight. It sufficed him to have seen the materials with which he could work. The vigour of a boundless imagination told him how a plan might be disposed that would embellish nature, and restore art to its proper office, the just improvement or imitation of it.

It is necessary that the concurrent testimony of the age should swear to posterity that the description quoted was written above half a century before the introduction of modern gardening, or our incredulous descendants will defraud the poet of half his glory, by being persuaded that he copied some garden or gardens he had seen-so minutely do his ideas correspond with the present standard. But what shall we say for that intervening half century who could read that plan and never attempt to put it in execution?

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