where the howling
was heard, discovered some disturbed earth, and the print of men's heels
ramming it down again very close, and, seeing Mr. Wade's servant, told
him he thought something had been buried there. '_Then_,' said the man,
'_it is our dogs, and they have been buried alive. I will go and fetch a
spade, and will find them, if I dig all Caudle over_.' He soon brought a
spade, and, upon removing the top earth, came to the blackthorns, and
then to the dogs, the biggest of which had eat the loins, and greatest
share of the hind parts, of the little one."

The strange ladies who were guilty of this slaughter of innocents showed
"a dying blaze of goodness" by bequeathing twelve thousand pounds to
charitable societies; and "thus ended," says Hanbury, "these two poor,
unhappy, uncharitable, charitable old gentlewomen."

The good old man describes the beauty of plants and trees with the same
delightful particularity which he spent on his neighbors and the buried
dogs.

I cannot anywhere learn whether or not the charity-plantation of
Church-Langton is still thriving.

About this very time, Lancelot Brown, who was for a long period the
kitchen-gardener at Stowe, came into sudden notoriety by his disposition
of the waters in Blenheim Park, where, in the short period of one week,
he created perhaps the finest artificial lake in the world. Its
indentations of shore, its bordering declivities of wood, and the
graceful swells of land dipping to its margin, remain now in very nearly
the same condition in which Brown left them more than a hundred years
ago. All over England the new man was sent for; all over England he
rooted out the mossy avenues, and the sharp rectangularities, and laid
down his flowing lines of walks, and of trees. He (wisely) never
contracted to execute his own designs, and--from lack of facility,
perhaps--he always employed assistants to draw his plans. But the quick
eye which at first sight recognized the "capabilities" of a place, and
which leaped to the recognition of its matured graces, was all his own.
He was accused of sameness; but the man who at one time held a thousand
lovely landscapes unfolding in his thought could hardly give a series of
contrasts without startling affectations.

I mention the name of Lancelot Brown, however, not to discuss his
merits, but as the principal and largest illustrator of that taste in
landscape-gardening which just now grew up in England, out of a new
reading o