I come now to speak of Thomas Whately, to whom I have already alluded, and of whom, from the scantiness of all record of his life, it is possible to say only very little.  He lived at Nonsuch Park, in Surrey, not many miles from London, on the road to Epsom.  He was engaged in public affairs, being at one time secretary to the Earl of Suffolk, and also a member of Parliament.  But I enroll him in my wet-day service simply as the author of the most appreciative and most tasteful treatise upon landscape-gardening which has ever been written,—­not excepting either Price or Repton.  It is entitled, “Observations on Modern Gardening,” and was first published in 1770.  It was the same year translated into French by Latapie, and was to the Continental gardeners the first revelation of the graces which belonged to English cultivated landscape.  In the course of the book he gives vivid descriptions of Blenheim, Hagley, Leasowes, Claremont, and several other well-known British places.  He treats separately of Parks, Water, Farms, Gardens, Ridings, etc., illustrating each with delicate and tender transcripts of natural scenes.  Now he takes us to the cliffs of Matlock, and again to the farm-flats of Woburn.  His criticisms upon the places reviewed are piquant, full of rare apprehension of the most delicate natural beauties, and based on principles which every man of taste must accept at sight.  As you read him, he does not seem so much a theorizer or expounder as he does the simple interpreter of graces which had escaped your notice.  His suggestions come upon you with such a momentum of truthfulness, that you cannot stay to challenge them.

There is no argumentation, and no occasion for it.  On such a bluff he tells us wood should be planted, and we wonder that a hundred people had not said the same thing before; on such a river-meadow the grassy level should lie open to the sun, and we wonder who could ever have doubted it.  Nor is it in matters of taste alone, I think, that the best things we hear seem always to have a smack of oldness in them,—­as if we remembered their virtue.  “Capital!” we say; “but hasn’t it been said before?” or, “Precisely!  I wonder I didn’t do or say the same thing myself.”  Whenever you hear such criticisms upon any performance, you may be sure that it has been directed by a sound instinct.  It is not a sort of criticism any one is apt to make upon flashy rhetoric, or upon flash gardening.

Whately alludes to the analogy between landscape-painting and landscape-gardening:  the true artists in either pursuit aim at the production of rich pictorial effects, but their means are different.  Does the painter seek to give steepness to a declivity?—­then he may add to his shading a figure or two toiling up.  The gardener, indeed, cannot plant a man there; but a copse upon the summit will add to the apparent height, and he may indicate the difficulty of ascent by a hand-rail running along the path.  The painter will extend his distance by the diminuendo of his mountains, or of trees stretching toward the horizon:  the gardener has, indeed, no handling of successive mountains, but he may increase apparent distance by leafy avenues leading toward the limit of vision; he may even exaggerate the effect still further by so graduating the size of his trees as to make a counterfeit perspective.