GENERAL EDITORS
William E. Conway, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles
Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles
David S. Rodes, University of California, Los Angeles
ADVISORY EDITORS
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia
Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Louis A. Landa, Princeton University
Earl Miner, Princeton University
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles
Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
James Sutherland, University College, London
H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles
Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY
Beverly J. Onley, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
INTRODUCTION
Stowe is certainly the most documented of all English Augustangardens,[1] and William Gilpin's Dialogue probably one of the mostimportant accounts of it. He was at Stowe in 1747 and published hisrecord of that visit anonymously the following year.[2] The Dialoguereached a second edition, with some slight alterations in the text, in1749 and a third in 1751, when the dialogue was transformed intonarrative.
The Dialogue recommends itself both to the historian of the Englishlandscape movement, in which Stowe was a prime exhibit, and to thestudent of the later vogue for the picturesque, in which Gilpin was amajor participant. His account of Cobham's gardens illuminates some ofthe connections between the cult of the picturesque that Gilpin fosteredwith his publications of the 1780s and the earlier eighteenth-centuryinvocation of pictures in gardens.
Perhaps in no other art form were the tensions and transformations inthe arts more conspicuous than in landscape gardening. Gilpin isespecially rewarding in his instinctive attention to these shiftingpatterns; although the dialogue form is not very skillfully handled, ityet allows some play between the rival attitudes. Thus his charactersattend to both the emblematic and the expressive garden;[3] to both itscelebration of public worth and its commendation of private virtue.While Gilpin seems sufficiently and indeed sharply aware of set-pieceviews in the gardens, the three-dimensional pictures contrived among thenatural and architectural features, he also reveals himself as sensitivetowards the more fluid psychological patterns, what one might term thekinema of landscape response. Above all, his obvious delight in thelandscape garden and appreciation of it vie with an equally strongadmiration for scenery outside gardens altogether.
At the time of Gilpin's visit, Lord Cobham's gardens were substantiallyas they are represented in the engravings published in 1739 by the widowof Charles Bridgeman, one of [Pg ii] Stowe's designers. In the year of Gilpin'svisit work had just started in the northeast part of the grounds uponthe natural glad