The controversy was carried over from Brown to his disciple and imitator, Sir Humphrey Repton (1752–1818). Repton in a courteous “Letter to Uvedale Price,” 1794, and again in his “Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening” (chap. vii and Appendix), 1795, defended the principles of landscape gardening adopted by Kent and Brown and followed in his own work. Price answered in “A Letter to Humphrey Repton,” 1795. In opposition to the claims of the devotees of the picturesque Repton put forward the beauty to be found “in the milder scenes that have charms for common observers,” and he protested against the rigid application of the laws governing landscape painting to an art so different in its views and possibilities as gardening. But Repton, though he had entered upon his work as the disciple and imitator of Brown, gradually changed, discarding the formalities of Brown and adopting a more varied and natural style of ornamentation. He made use of some of the ideas of the “artistical” or picturesque school, but so modified them according to the dictates of good sense and good taste, as to establish the beautiful and natural parks and gardens in which England led the world. The picturesque garden had two offshoots that cannot be passed over. The idea of imitating a picture, when carried to an excess, led to frantic effort to put cliffs, precipices, gnarled oaks, ruined, moss-grown fortresses, ivy-hung abbeys, into every landscape. Frequent sage advice is given as to the best ways to secure these effects. Richard Jago, a friend of Shenstone, urges the importance of appropriate sites--a cliff for a ruined castle, a well-water’d vale for “the mouldering abbey’s fretted windows.”[564] In 1772 Gilpin criticized Shuckburgh because the ruins were not “happily fabricated,” but he adds in exculpation, “It is not every man, who can build a house, that can execute a ruin.” There follows a long list of the mechanical difficulties, with the following conclusion, “When it is well done, we allow, that nothing can be more beautiful: but we see everywhere so many absurd attempts of this kind, that when we walk through a piece of improved ground, and hear of being carried next to _see the ruins_, if the master of the scene be with us, we dread the encounter.” In “The Spiritual Quixote,” 1773, is an amusing account of a visit of Sir Geoffry Wildgoose to a noted estate. The ignorant keeper in showing off various objects of interest calls attention to the “_turpentine_ walks,” and then leads the way to the ruins explaining that it was built “but a few years ago; and his Lordship used to say, he could have _built_ it as _old_ again, if he had had a mind.” An antiquary present exclaims,