Hermitages sprang up everywhere, with hermits, real or dummy. Any
good house near a wood, or in a shady position, was called a
hermitage, and dedicated to arcadian life, free from care and
ceremony. Classic and romantic styles competed for favour in
architecture; at one moment everything must needs be purely classic,
each temple Corinthian, Ionic, or Doric; at another Gothic, with the
ruins and fortresses of mediæval romance. And not only English
gardens, but those of Europe generally, though to a less degree,
passed through these stages of development, for no disease is so
infectious as fashion.

It was not till the end of the eighteenth century that a healthy
reaction set in in England, when Repton turned back to Kent's
fundamental principle and freed it from its unnatural excrescences,
with the formula: the garden should be an artistic representation of
the landscape, a work of art whose materials are provided by Nature
herself, whether grass, flowers, bushes, trees, water, or whatever it
may be that she has to offer. Thus began our modern landscape
gardening.

In another region too, a change was brought about from the Rococo to
a more natural style. It is true that Nature plays no direct _rôle_
in _Robinson Crusoe_, and wins as little notice there as in its
numberless imitations; yet the book roused a longing for healthier,
more natural conditions in thousands of minds. It led the idyllic
tendency of the day back to its source, and by shewing all the
stages, from the raw state of Nature up to the culture of the
community, in the life of one man, it brought out the contrast
between the far-off age of innocence and the perverted present.