Mr. Robinson's strongest objection is to “clipping.” He regards with abhorrence what he calls after Horace Walpole, “vegetable sculpture.” Well, last year, being in the neighbourhood of one of the houses which he illustrates as an example of his “natural” style of gardening, I thought I should take the opportunity of verifying his quotations. I visited the place, but when I arrived at what I was told was the entrance, I felt certain that I had been misdirected, for I found myself looking through a wrought-iron gate at an avenue bounded on both sides with some of the most magnificent clipped box hedges I had ever seen. Within I was overwhelmed with the enormous masses treated in the same way. It was not hedges they were, but walls--massive fortifications, ten feet high and five thick, and all clipped I I never saw such examples of topiary work. To stand among these _bêtes noires_ of Mr. Robinson made one feel as if one were living among the mastodons and other monstrosities of the early world: the smallest suggested both in form and bulk the Jumbo of our youth--no doubt it had a trunk somewhere, but it was completely hidden. The lawn--at the bottom of which, by the way, there stood the most imposing garden-house I had ever seen outside the grounds of Stowe--was divided geometrically by the awful bodies of mastodons, mammoths, elephants, and hippopotamuses, the effect being hauntingly Wilsonian, Wagnerian, and nightmarish, so that I was glad to hurry away to where I caught a glimpse of some geometrical flower beds, with patterns delightfully worked in shades of blue--Lord Roberts heliotrope, ageratum, and verbena. I asked the head-gardener, whom the war had limited to two assistants, if he spent much time over the clipping, and he told me that it took two trained men doing nothing else but clipping those walls for six weeks out of every year! From what Mr. Robinson has written one gathers that he regards the clipping of trees as equal in enormity to the clipping of coins--perhaps even more so. If that is the case, it is lucky for those topiarists that he is not in the same position as Sir Charles Mathews. And the foregoing is a faithful description of the “landscape” around one of the houses illustrated in his book as an example of the “naturalistic” style. But perhaps Mr. Robinson's ideas have become modified, as those of the owner of the house must have done during the twenty-five years that have elapsed since the publication of his book, subjecting Mr. Blomfield (as he was then) and Mr. Inigo Triggs to a criticism whose severity resembles that of the _Quarterly Review_ of a hundred years ago, or the _Saturday_ of our boyhood.