In another passage the heroine is said to lead her unhappy friend into the garden, “supposing a person whose uneasiness proceeded from love would be pleased with the sight of groves and streams.” In “Ferdinand Count Fathom” (Smollett, 1753) there is merely a conventional description of a furious storm. In “Sir Charles Grandison” (Richardson, 1753) there are two interesting passages concerning the estate of Sir Charles. It was his aim not “to force and distort nature, but to help it as he finds it, without letting art be seen in his works, where he can possibly avoid it” (Vol. II, p. 276). A part of the estate was evidently laid out according to the ideas of Kent and Brown, but the orchard “with its regular semicircle rows of pears, apples, cherries, plums and apricots, arranged according to the season of flowering,” belonged to the days of Sir Thomas, when symmetry and regularity ruled (Vol. IV, p. 238). In this novel also is Richardson’s frequently quoted description of Savoy, “equally noted for its poverty and rocky mountains ... one of the worst countries under heaven” (Vol. III, pp. 138–42). We have now passed the middle of the century and there has not been in the works of fiction mentioned a single passage indicating any close observation or love of Nature, and hardly a passage showing any knowledge of Nature except as found in parks and gardens. But in 1756–66 there appeared a fantastic novel by Thomas Amory called “The Life of John Buncle,” which is notable in the present study because nearly all the adventures whereby the hero gains and loses his seven Socinian wives occur among the mountains of Westmoreland and Cumberland. We have but to compare the book with Mrs. Ward’s “Robert Elsmere” to see how extravagantly unreal are most of Amory’s descriptions. They often contain marvels equal to those of “Vathek.” The mountains are made as lofty and dangerous as the most inaccessible Alps, and they are so heaped in together that progress from one valley to another would be out of the question were it not for convenient caves and natural tunnels by which the venturesome hero makes his way from vale to vale. But in the midst of these absurdities and impossibilities, there are occasional passages of effective description, and of real appreciation of wild mountain scenery. It is an entirely new note in fiction and it followed close upon the poem by Dr. Dalton, which was probably the first poetical tribute to the scenery of the Lakes. Mr. Amory aptly describes mountain tarns as pools of “black, standing, unfathomable water” (Vol. I, p. 290). He frequently gives enthusiastic descriptions of the views from mountain tops. In one passage he says: “I climbed up to the top by a steep, craggy way. This was very difficult and dangerous, but I had an enchanting prospect when I gained the summit of the hill.... The vast hills had a fine effect in the view” (Vol. II, p. 122; cf. Vol. I, p. 167). Of Westmoreland he says: