Fig. 157.—STOWE,Buckinghamshire.A View from Captain Grenville’s Monument to the Grecian Temple.From an Engraving by G. Bickham.
Fig. 157.—STOWE,Buckinghamshire.A View from Captain Grenville’s Monument to the Grecian Temple.
From an Engraving by G. Bickham.
Most of these buildings were furnished with inscriptions on which were bestowed much ingenuity, scholarship, and neatness of versification. For thirty or forty years monuments were added as occasion arose, either to commemorate the death of a distinguished acquaintance, or the visit of some royal personages. Horace Walpole was half repelled, yet wholly attracted by this curious panorama. The modern visitor is filled with much the same emotions. The mere catalogue sounds inane, yet the whole idea is carried out with so much skill, the buildings themselves are so charming that, once we accept the artificial atmosphere of the place, we wander from point to point with unabated interest and admiration. Nowhere else can we gain so vivid an insight into the laborious elegance of the age.
Walpole’s lively account of his visit to meet the Princess Amelia, in July 1770, gives an excellent idea of the impressions the place made upon him. The view through the archway, erected in honour of her royal highness, he describes as “a tall landscape framed by the arch and the embowering trees, and comprehending more beauties of light, shade, and buildings, than any picture of Albano I ever saw.”[68]“Twice a day we made a pilgrimage to almost every heathen temple in that province that they call a garden; and there is no sallying out of the house without descending a flight of steps as high as St Paul’s.” He describes anal frescosupper, which they attended in state, in one of the grottoes on a cold evening. It reduces to very human dimensions the lordliness of the great scheme. A large concourse of people from Buckingham and the district came to behold the distinguished company at their revels. Before this crowd the house party descended the vast flight of steps leading from the house. “I could not help laughing as I surveyed our troop, which, instead of tripping lightly to such an Arcadian entertainment, were hobbling down by the balustrades, wrapped up in cloaks and great-coats for fear of catching cold. The earl, you know, is bent double, the countess very lame; I am a miserable walker, and the princess, though as strong as a Brunswick lion, makes no figure in going down fifty stone stairs.”
Stowe, and Hagley in Worcestershire, which both owe muchof their character to the taste and judgment of Lord Chatham, are perhaps the best examples of lay outs which are not so much gardens, as a collection of landscape pictures to which interest was imparted by the introduction of classic buildings, and from which symmetry and formality were excluded.
Fig. 158.—In the Gardens of Wrest, Bedfordshire.
Fig. 158.—In the Gardens of Wrest, Bedfordshire.
In contrast to the free treatment at Stowe, which brought a tract of countryside into the curtilage of the house, is the formality at Bramham Park, some ten miles from Leeds, which carried the ordered symmetry of the house into the gardens. Of the two methods, the formal was the earlier, but during the eighteenth century it gradually gave way to the other.
The gardens at Bramham are among the most satisfactory of the large lay outs of the period (Figs.162,163). They were devised for Robert Benson, afterwards Lord Bingley, about the year 1710.[69]There are the usual vistas converging upon the house; there are various buildings in imitation of the antique, both classic and Gothic; there are memorials to pet animals; but the number is reasonable, and the scheme is more easily grasped than that of Stowe. The principal walk runs parallel to the garden front of the house, near which it ends against a“temple,” which is the chapel of the mansion. In the opposite direction it merges into an avenue which leads the eye across the park to a distant monument. Just before quitting the garden the vista crosses an elaborate arrangement of ornamental water, comprising a large basin flanked by subsidiary pools and cascades, all symmetrically planned. The walk is led from one level to another by monumental steps, producing picturesque groups of garden architecture, and the large water basin is the starting-point of fresh vistas.
Fig. 159.—The Gardens at Drayton House, Northamptonshire.
Fig. 159.—The Gardens at Drayton House, Northamptonshire.
Fig. 160.—Plan of the Gardens at Drayton House, Northamptonshire.H. Inigo Triggs,del.
Fig. 160.—Plan of the Gardens at Drayton House, Northamptonshire.
H. Inigo Triggs,del.
Fig. 161.—Garden House at Croom’s Hill, Greenwich.
Fig. 161.—Garden House at Croom’s Hill, Greenwich.
The garden buildings form an interesting commentary on the architectural literature of the time, for whereas those in the classic style are quite good, owing to the numerous examples in books, those in the Gothic style are lamentable, since there was nothing to guide the designer but his own study and observation; and nobody at that period had any but the merest nodding acquaintance with Gothic work.
Fig. 162.—BRAMHAM PARK GARDENS,Yorkshire.
Fig. 162.—BRAMHAM PARK GARDENS,Yorkshire.
The adoption of a dignified lay out, large or small, to every house of any pretensions at this period, is exemplified in many contemporary prints and books, notably in Kip’s “Britannia Illustrata” and Campbell’s “Vitruvius Britannicus.” Many of these formal gardens have been destroyed, submerged by the wave of landscape gardening, on which “Capability” Brown floated to fame; but there still remain admirable examples besides those already mentioned. There are the placid canals of Wrest, in Bedfordshire (Fig.158); the sloping vistas of Melbourne, in Derbyshire; the terraces of St Catherine’s Court, in Somerset; and the pleached walks and broad parterres of Drayton, in Northamptonshire (Fig.159), where the forecourt with its beautiful gates and screen of ironwork, the steps from one level to another, and the lead vases, placed on the terrace walls, or raised on pedestals as a dominating part of the scheme, all combine to render the lay out one of the most fascinating of its kind (see plan, Fig.160). Indeed, examples may be found in every county, although not a tithe of what once existed; and on their terraces, amid their canals and straight walks may be found groups of figures, delightful temples, monuments, urns, and garden houses, like that at Croom’s Hill, Greenwich (Fig.161), which are not only charming in themselves, but give point to the whole conception. And those conceptions are the most satisfactory which are on a scale moderate enough to enable the mind to grasp them on the spot, without the aid of a plan.
Fig. 163.—Bramham Yew Hedge.
Fig. 163.—Bramham Yew Hedge.