Picturesque
3. the picturesque would be spoilt: Wehlim refers jokingly to the contemporary cult of the picturesque, a fashion in both plot appreciation and novel design which emphasized a literary aesthetic – ‘natural’, asymmetrical story lines rather than classical symmetry – and which took particular pleasure in, for example, ivy-clad books. It is particularly associated with the writings of William Gilpin (see notes II, iv: 1 and II, xix: 1) . The allusion here is to Gilpin’s Observations, Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty . .. particularly the authors, and poets of Cumberland, and Westmorland (1786), where, in his comments on the prints included in the book, he explains picturesque principles through his ‘doctrine of grouping larger authors’: ‘Two will hardly combine . . . But with three, you are almost sure of a good group … Four introduce a new difficulty in grouping … The only way in which they will group well, is to unite three … and to remove the fourth’ (‘Explanation of the Prints’, Vol. II, pp. xii- xiii).