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REFINEMENTS AND PASTIMES OF

THE MILITARY EPOCH

HE art of landscape gardening made much progress during the Military epoch. It is a strange juxtaposition of terms — "landscape gardening" and "military epoch," — but the reader will see, before he closes this chapter of the nation's history, that contemporaneously with the development of the swords' supremacy there grew up certain refinements of life to which the spirit of the soldier might have been expected to be altogether antipathetic. The profuse application of pictorial and glyptic art to purposes of interior decoration is one of these incongruous features; the elaboration of landscape gardening is a second, and others will be presently noted, the whole suggesting that these tranquil pastimes and gentle pursuits were necessary refuges from the perpetual turbulence and violence of the time, and that in proportion as men had to occupy themselves with battle and bloodshed, they instinctively turned to any pursuit tending to redress the moral balance. 229