Note 7 — Chapter II · ITS SCENERY.

Remarks on Forest Scenery, illustrated by the New Forest, vol. ii., pp. 241-46; third edition. Some mention should here be made of Gilpin, a man who, in a barren, unnatural age, partook of much of the same spirit as Cowper and Thompson, and whose work should be placed side by side with their poems. Unfortunately, much of his description is now quite useless, as the Forest has been so much altered; but the real value of the book still remains unchanged in its pure love for Nature and its simple, unaffected tone. It is well worth, however, noticing—as showing the enormous difficulty of overcoming an established error—that, notwithstanding his true appreciation of bough-forms (see vol. i., pp. 110-12, same edition), and his hatred of pollarded shapes, and all formalism (same vol., p. 4), he had not sufficient force to break through the conventional drawing of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, and his trees (see, as before, pp. 252-54) are all drawn under the impression that they are a gigantic species of cabbage. The edition, however, published in 1834, and edited by Sir T. D. Lauder, is, in this and many other respects, far better.