Those who in the eighteenth century began to feel the need of less trimness in nature and human nature were not it is true entirely without neo-classic predecessors. They turned at times to painting--as the very word picturesque testifies--for the encouragement they failed to find in literature. A landscape was picturesque when it seemed like a picture[198] and it might be not merely irregular but savage if it were to seem like some of the pictures of Salvator Rosa. This association of even wildness with art is very characteristic of eighteenth-century sentimentalism. It is a particular case of that curious blending in this period of the old principle of the imitation of models with the new principle of spontaneity. There was a moment when a man needed to show a certain taste for wildness if he was to be conventionally correct. “The fops,” says Taine, describing Rousseau’s influence on the drawing-rooms, “dreamt between two madrigals of the happiness of sleeping naked in the virgin forest.” The prince in Goethe’s “Triumph of Sensibility” has carried with him on his travels canvas screens so painted that when placed in position they give him the illusion of being in the midst of a wild landscape. This taste for artificial wildness can however best be studied in connection with the increasing vogue in the eighteenth century of the English garden as compared either with the Italian garden or the French garden in the style of Le Nôtre.[199] As a relief from the neo-classical symmetry, nature was broken up, often at great expense, into irregular and unexpected aspects. Some of the English gardens in France and Germany were imitated directly from Rousseau’s famous description of this method of dealing with the landscape in the “Nouvelle Héloïse.”[200] Artificial ruins were often placed in the English garden as a further aid to those who wished to wander imaginatively from the beaten path, and also as a provocative of the melancholy that was already held to be distinguished. Towards the end of the century this cult of ruins was widespread. The veritable obsession with ruins that one finds in Chateaubriand is not unrelated to this sentimental fashion, though it arises even more perhaps from the real ruins that had been so plentifully supplied by the Revolution.