the idea of variety by his writings on the dwellings and manners of
the Chinese.[10]

The fundamental idea that the garden ought to be a sample of the
landscape was common both to Kent and the Chinese; but, as China is
far richer than England in varieties of scenery, her gardens included
mountains, rocks, swamps, and deserts, as well as sunny fields and
plains, while English gardens were comparatively monotonous. When the
fashion for the Chinese style came in, as unluckily it did just when
we were trying to oust the Rococo, so that one pigtail superseded the
other, variety was achieved by groups of buildings in all sorts of
styles. Stables, ice-houses, gardeners' cottages took the form of
pavilions, pagodas, kiosks, and temples.

Meanwhile, as a reaction against the Rococo, enthusiasm for Nature
increased, and feeling was set free from restraint by the growing
sentimentality. Richardson's novels fed the taste for the pleasures
of weeping sensibility, and garden-craft fell under its sway. In all
periods the insignificant and non-essential is unable to resist the
general stamp, if that only shews a little originality.

These gardens, with temples to friendship and love, melancholy,
virtue, re-union, and death, and so forth, were suitable backgrounds
for the sentimental scenes described in the English novels, and for
the idyllic poets and moonshine singers of Germany. Here it was the
fashion to wander, tenderly intertwined, shedding floods of tears and
exchanging kisses, and pausing at various places to read the
inscriptions which directed them what to feel. At one spot they were
to laugh, at another to weep, at a third to be fired with devotion.