foreign inspiration influence exaggeration beauty The first book by the English architect Sir William Chambers voices a sub theme lurking in the background of picturesque theory \[Dash] the Chinese garden. At a time the garden in England were so far opposed to the Chinese habit of overcrowding its buildings, Chambers wrote his famous essay, On Oriental Gardening, as a direct protest against the devastation and emptiness in the gardens of the Homeland. It is worth noting that in England the concept of the garden had long been associated with ideas of political order and paradise, but the whole discussion took a sharply political turn in 1772, with the publication of 'A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening'. The real influence on English landscape gardening that came from China is connected with this work. Together with Whately's treatise, William Chambers' treatise was the most debated, translated and referred to in the rest of Europe. His publication was couched in ironic and hyperbolic language and heavily indebted to Whately, yet was more than just a reworking of others' ideas. A book which combined sharp satire at the expense of the English landscape architect Capability Brown, with some authentic ideas of Chambers's own and a great deal of nonsense, which was perhaps taken more seriously than its author intended. The publication included "An explanatory discourse by Tan Chet.qua of Quang Chew fu." In this discourse he made his invented character tell of the fantastic gardens that could be made close to the cities as "scenes of terror." At the beginning of his Dissertation he wrote, in a statement which closely reproduced the thinking of his friend Sir Joshua Reynolds, 'Nature is incapable of pleasing without the assistance of art'. Chambers, in the spirit of the Sharawadgi tradition, had praised Chinese gardens for their 'beautiful irregularities' and 'variety of scenes', and introduced 'pleasing, horrid and enchanted' as aesthetic categories. The Architect always overlooked one unbridgeable difference between English and Chinese requirements. The Englishman likes to be tempted to seek view after view, by paths that are as winding as possible; and the little, necessarily restricted views which the Chinaman can enjoy sitting down, would of course be unattractive to him. What wonder that a lively protest greeted the writings of Chambers ! It happened, moreover, that the Dissertation appeared after the fashion for China had declined on the Continent. In England there arose at once contradictory voices, and in the forefront of the battle stood the poet William Mason. He felt himself to be the herald and poet of the new style, a warrior fighting for the rights of Nature, who laughs at her fetters, and allows no beauties that are foreign to the soil which she bestows on us.