Walpole's Whig Interpretation of Landscaping History

W a lp o le 's W h ig In te rp re ta tio n onmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA o f L a n d sc a p in g H isto ry R IC H A R D E . Q U A IN T A N C E “The English Taste in Gardening is thus the growth of the English Constitution, & must perish with it,” asserts the son of that prime minister whose long public career had so sturdily dramatized a vigor of national constitution. By 1779, interleaving a friend’s satires on landscape-style with his private notes, Horace Walpole associates that constitution with an “English” respect for local vitality and circum­ stance nascent before Pitt’s “Great War for Empire,” or 1689, even in the laws of Alfred. Naturally, he felt, such respect would find even­ tual expression in the science of landscaping, as in the art of politics. Whig regard for talented initiative, confidence in “improvement,” and mistrust of “an arbitrary monarchy,” espoused laissez-faire in park design as well as in parliamentary program. Impatient himself for the colonists’ victory in America, Walpole suggests that the reason why Taste in Gardening was never discovered before the beginning of the present Century, is, that It was the result of all the happy combinations of an Empire of Freemen, an Empire formed by Trade, not by a military