‘The Landscape’ is an elaborate protest against the then fashionable modes of gardening, which sought to ‘improve’ nature, almost as much by replacement as by selection. On many points the poem is marked by good sense and just thought, as well as by vigour of expression, but its reasoning is far superior to its poetry. What is said of the choice and growth of trees shows thorough knowledge of the subject and true taste. But it needs no poet to convict ‘Capability BROWN’ of ignorance in his own pursuit when he insisted on ‘the careful removal of every token of decay’ as a cardinal maxim in landscape-gardening. Such topics may well be left to plain prose. The one notable feature in the poem which has still an interest is its curious indication of that peculiarity in Mr. KNIGHT’S creed which asserted—in relation both to the works of nature and to those of art—that beauty is absolutely inconsistent with vastness. The excessive love of the minute and delicate led Mr. KNIGHT into the greatest practical error of his public life, as will be seen presently. At this time it merely led him to the bold assertion that no mountain ought to dare to lift its head so high as to— ‘Shame the high-spreading oak, or lofty tower.’ The lines which follow are, it will be seen, curiously prophetic of that controversy about the Marbles of the Parthenon in which Mr. Payne KNIGHT took so large a share:— ‘But as vain painters, destitute of skill, Large sheets of canvas with large figures fill, And think with shapes gigantic to supply Grandeur of form, and grace of symmetry, So the rude gazer ever thinks to find The view sublime, when vast and undefined. ’Tis form, not magnitude, adorns the scene. A hillock may be grand, and the vast Andes mean. Oft have I heard the silly traveller boast The grandeur of Ontario’s endless coast; Where, far as he could dart his wandering eye, He nought but boundless water could descry. With equal reason, Keswick’s favoured pool Is made the theme of every wondering fool.’ Within a few months, this poem—little as it is now remembered—went through two editions. It was soon followed by a more ambitious flight. In 1796, its author published ‘_The Progress of Civil Society; a didactic poem_.’