The subject of oriental gardens was also much discussed in prose and verse. In 1752 appeared “An Account of the Emperor of China’s Gardens at Pekin” by Père Attiret, translated by Sir H. Beaumont (i.e., Joseph Spence).[565] In 1760 came Goldsmith’s “Description of a Chinese Garden.” Most influential of all was “A Dissertation on Oriental Gardens” by Sir William Chambers in 1772. The practical influence of the discussion of Chinese gardens went little beyond the building of summer-houses and bridges in the Chinese style. But the naturalistic school in England was strengthened by an appeal to the Chinese method of copying Nature “in all her beautiful irregularities,” while the sentimentality of gardens such as Leasowes seemed to receive sanction from the efforts of Chinese gardeners to construct scenes with the express purpose of arousing certain emotions. The “fancies and surprises” of Chinese effects were pleasing to those who, as Sir William Chambers, thought Kent’s English gardens “no better than so many fields.” The popularity of writings on oriental gardening is furthermore significant of the enlarged horizons, the prevailing interest in the new and the remote, characteristic of one phase of romanticism, and it is to be classed as a sign of the times along with the interest in oriental eclogues in the realm of poetry. Incomplete and cursory as so short a study of so great a subject must be, the facts here presented seem to warrant the following statements: The feeling toward Nature in the period studied shows in gardening the same order of development, nearly the same dates, and the same phases as in poetry. There was first in both a pleased recognition of the supremacy of man, a rigid exclusiveness, a love of order, of symmetry, and of definite limits. Then came, in the early eighteenth century, a tentative turning from art to Nature; then an epoch-making statement in each art, Thomson’s “Seasons” from 1726 to 1730, and Pope’s “Epistle” in 1731. From this point on the development was in mass and variety rather than in the enunciation of new principles. The growing love for wild Nature in the poetry, and the passion for the picturesque in gardening proceed side by side. At the end of the century all is ready in both arts for the splendid work of the new era. Throughout the century both have had curiously correspondent offshoots or temporary fads--sentimental melancholy in poetry, and the ruins, artificial and real, in gardening; foreign eclogues and studies of distant countries in the one art, and Chinese gardens in the other. CHAPTER VI LANDSCAPE PAINTING