The Capability controversy

In a piece of light verse from the 1770s ‘Dame Nature’ — out strolling ‘one bright day’ — bumps into the great landscape designer, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Immediately the goddess lays into him for plagiarism. How, she wants to know, does he have the impudence to show his face? All the items he claims to have created — ‘the lawn, wood and water’ — were made in fact by her.

Brown, for his part, is not at all disconcerted. He admits that Nature has provided him with good raw materials. But the beautifying refinements? Those are all his. ‘The swell of that knoll,’ he points out, ‘is mine… the ridges are melted, the boundaries gone.’

Rather ungallantly, he asks Nature to admit, ‘I have cloth’d you when naked, and when overdrest, I have stripp’d you again to your bodice and vest.’ In short, he has improved on nature: ‘concealed every blemish, each beauty display’d’.