I don’t at all approve of these deceptions.... I don’t wonder that any gentleman should wish to have his woods or gardens adorned with these venerable Gothic structures; as they strike the imagination with vast pleasure, both by the greatness of the object, and also by giving us a melancholy idea of their past grandeur and magnificence. But for a man to _build a ruin_, or to erect a modern house in the style of our Gothic ancestors--appears to me the same absurdity ... as that which many people have of late run into, of having their pictures drawn in the habits of Vandyke or Sir Peter Lely. Mr. Mason, in “The English Garden” deprecates building ruins, but thinks a man to be congratulated if on his grounds one superior rock Bear on its brow the shivered fragment huge Of some old Norman fortress; happier far, Oh, then most happy, if thy vale below Wash, with the crystal coolness of its rills, Some mouldering abbey’s ivy-vested wall. This search after ruins was a morbid and exaggerated development of the new love of the old, the wild, the picturesque, just as the sentimental melancholy in poetry was a morbid and exaggerated development of the new poetic turning to emotional introspection, to solitude, to thoughts of death and the grave. In the extreme form both phases were ephemeral, and, it is interesting to note, were nearly contemporaneous. Batty Langley was advocating “ruins” in gardens in 1728 but it is not till after the middle of the century that they seem to have been accepted as a necessary part of an estate, and this is just the period when the spirit of sentimental melancholy in poetry, a spirit that had found early expression in the night-piece of Parnell and Lady Winchilsea, reached its culmination.