Mason's _Heroic Epistle_ was one of the century's most popular poems and, cheered on by Walpole, a viscously successful effort to tar with Chambers' lavish brush his patron George Bute and other assorted Scots, any critic of Brown, and the Tory establishment at large. Yet behind Chambers' oriental screen the novelty, enduring interest, and even the practicality of some of his ideas can be observed. That concern to naturalize the smoky mills of industrialization may be developing a hint (concerning Middleton Dale, in the Peak District) on page 94 of Thomas Whately's supremely influential _Observations on Modern Gardening_ (1770). If Chambers' generation was neither the first nor last to grapple with what "progress" had done to the land, the English landscaping movement presented a new stage for that encounter. While Chet-qua's proposal to frame the dreary tracts around a metropolis "into scenes of terror" seems less than helpful, how neatly he anticipates Cezanne's transfer of his easel into the abandoned Bibemus Quarry (pp. 130-132). Foreshadowing William Cowper's satire of "Th' omnipotent magician, Brown" in _The Task_, Chambers had warned that estate-"improvement" could lead to irreparable devastation of the nation's woodland. Several of Chambers' means to certain effects sound more like a practical landscape architect at work than a Disneyland impressario parading his promised thrills: when he urges diversification of material relative to seasonal change or human entertainments, for instance, or the use of wire fencing and other substitutes for the ha-ha. His interest in the harmonizing of diverse but massed hues and textures has been recognized as an early glimpse of the "English" effects secured by Gertrude Jekyll a century and a quarter later.[12] Though extravagances of Chambers' language distracted attention from the liberalism of his views, such passages of the _Dissertation_ as pp. 49-50 read like the Picturesque identified by William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight in the 1780s and '90s. Far from the (Sino-British) imperial privity which Mason tartly mocked are Chet-qua's suggestions that the country-house owner drop his palings and open his grounds to "Holy-day folks," as he opens his Park to his kitchen-garden. More than this, he should offer "meats for every palate," plan not for his family or honored guests alone, but for tastes more susceptible to surprise than theirs. Likewise the circuit plan would be well replaced by another less coercive.[13] Points like these reveal in Chambers a solicitude on behalf of a general public of garden-strollers not at all necessarily landholding, nor self-conscious as "connoisseurs." Perhaps this is why, when the planners grouped around Nikolaus Pevsner and his _Architectural Review_ surveyed their task in postwar England, they would find fresh applications for the term "picturesque" and fresh relevance in this Tory's "Chinese" gardens.[14] Sinologists and