The complicated geometry that began on Bridgeman's drawing board[6] and then was transferred to shape the grounds is certainly a survival of the old-fashioned French style in gardens. Its presence is registered by Gilpin, who allows Callophilus to note how the Gibbs building, like many other objects at Stowe designed to be seen along a variety of axes, "has its Use ... in several Prospects" (p. 8). But the psychology of the viewer has at least equal weight in Gilpin with the many-faceted object viewed from different positions.[7] And in those circumstances the presence of formal or informal designs upon the ground or the drawing-board matters less than the variety of objects and scenes within a garden and even, as at the Rotunda, the variety of viewpoint and interpretation within one vista. Variety had, of course, always been essential to the English garden and is a special feature of Stowe, as Pope implies in the _Epistle to Burlington_ and as the writer of the appendix to Defoe's Tour of 1742 explicitly stated.[8] What we have in Gilpin's _Dialogue_ is both valuable evidence of response to garden structures, the visitor's rather than the designer's or client's account, and some hints of how the idea of variety, itself a painterly term, presented itself to Gilpin in the days before his picturesque tours. Gilpin's path through the gardens at Stowe is recorded in the _Dialogue_ as a journal of the mind's responses: the _Advertisement_ (p. iv) prepares the reader for this with its insistence upon the role memory has played in its composition. The varieties of mental experience are sometimes registered by the dialogue form; more often the two visitors share responses which correspond to the changes of Stowe's scenes. This is most amusingly illustrated by the "impertinent Hedge" that suddenly blocks their view (p. 11); Callophilus' ingenious explanation, a curious parallel to Sterne's blank page in _Tristram Shandy_, is that thereby the visitor's "Attention" is kept awake (p. 12). More strenuous is their intellectual involvement with the monuments, statues, and inscriptions in the Elysian Fields (pp. 19ff), emblems that provoke in Callophilus "a Variety of grand Ideas" (p. 29). Yet, as the text of the third edition makes precisely clear (p. 11), in face of the same objects his companion is more fascinated than he with the formal elements of an art--contrasts in landscape textures, style of inscriptions (p. 30), or unadmirable workmanship in bas-reliefs (p. 37). The "Subject[s] for ... Rapsody" (p. 30) that Polypthon mocks were an essential aspect of any Augustan garden, and six pages later they divert even Polypthon himself into moralizing. But his stronger inclination is to ignore the iconographical problems of the Saxon busts (p. 44) and gaze "into the Country" where his companion solicitously directs his attention to the elegant woods (p. 45).