Produced by Tor Martin Kristiansen, Sue Fleming, Joseph Cooper and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY [WILLIAM GILPIN] A DIALOGUE UPON THE GARDENS OF THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THE Lord Viscount _COBHAM_ AT STOW IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE _(1748)_ _Introduction by_ JOHN DIXON HUNT PUBLICATION NUMBER _176_ WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES _1976_ GENERAL EDITORS William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles David S. Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles ADVISORY EDITORS James L. Clifford, Columbia University Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Louis A. Landa, Princeton University Earl Miner, Princeton University Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library James Sutherland, University College, London H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library CORRESPONDING SECRETARY Beverly J. Onley, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library INTRODUCTION Stowe is certainly the most documented of all English Augustan gardens,[1] and William Gilpin's _Dialogue_ probably one of the most important accounts of it. He was at Stowe in 1747 and published his record of that visit anonymously the following year.[2] The _Dialogue_ reached a second edition, with some slight alterations in the text, in 1749 and a third in 1751, when the dialogue was transformed into narrative. The _Dialogue_ recommends itself both to the historian of the English landscape movement, in which Stowe was a prime exhibit, and to the student of the later vogue for the picturesque, in which Gilpin was a major participant. His account of Cobham's gardens illuminates some of the connections between the cult of the picturesque that Gilpin fostered with his publications of the 1780s and the earlier eighteenth-century invocation of pictures in gardens.