BRIDGMAN'S portrait was a private plate. It exhibited a kind-hearted, hale old countenance. As he has the honour of being classed with Mr. _Addison_, and with _Pope_, and _Kent_, as one of the champions who established the picturesque scenery of landscape gardening, (which _Bacon_, and _Spencer_, and _Milton_, as hath been observed, foresaw) his portrait must surely be interesting. The engraved portrait which I saw of him more than fifty years ago, made then a strong impression on me. I think it was an etching. It marked a venerable healthy man. I neither recollect its painter nor engraver; and it is so scarce, that neither Mr. Smith, of Lisle Street, nor Mr. Evans, of Great Queen Street, the intelligent collectors and illustrators of Granger, have been able to obtain it. Perhaps it will be discovered that it was a private plate, done at the expence of his generous and noble employer, Lord Cobham. Of this once able and esteemed man, I can procure little information. The Encycl. of Gardening says, "Lord Cobham seems to have been occupied in re-modelling the grounds at _Stowe_, about the same time that Pope was laying out his gardens at Twickenham. His lordship began these improvements in 1714, _employing Bridgman_, whose plans and views for altering old Stowe from the most rigid character of the ancient style to a more open and irregular design, are still in existence. Kent was employed a few years afterwards, first to paint the hall, and afterwards in the double capacity of architect and landscape-gardener; and the finest scenes there are his creation." The finest views of Stowe gardens were drawn by Rigaud, and published by _Sarah Bridgman_, in 1739. The fine and magnificent amphitheatre at the Duke of Newcastle's, at Claremont, was designed, I believe, by Bridgman. When Queen Caroline added nearly three hundred acres from Hyde Park to the gardens at Kensington, they were laid out by him. He also laid out the gardens at Shardeloes, near Amersham. Mr. Walpole thus mentions Bridgman, after alluding to the shears having been applied to the lovely wildness of nature: "Improvements had gone on, till _London_ and _Wise_ had stocked our gardens with giants, animals, monsters, coats of arms, and mottos, in yew, box and holly. Absurdity could go no farther, and the tide turned. _Bridgman_, the next fashionable designer of gardens, was far more chaste; and whether from good sense, or that the nation had been struck and reformed by the admirable paper in the Guardian, No. 173, he banished verdant sculpture, and did not even revert to the square precision of the foregoing age. He enlarged his plans, disdained to make every division tally to its opposite; and though he still adhered much to straight walks with high clipped hedges, they were only his great lines, the rest he diversified by wilderness and with loose groves of oak, though still within surrounding hedges. I have observed in the garden at Gubbins, in Hertfordshire, many detached thoughts, that