Grammars of Approach

Romancing the Courtroom Anecdote: Henry Cockburn’s and Walter Scott’s Shared Historical Form

“…43 The same is true in work pertaining to other authors, and Wall goes so far as to produce a chart that associates elements of Jane Austen's fiction with elements of the picturesque garden: "light and shade" in Gilpin, for example, correspond to "irony" in Austen, as do "textures and expressions" to "sentence lengths and punctuation." 44 As I have noted, Cockburn was a critic of architecture who had a brilliant mind for observing the uses of space-still, it is unlikely that he used the word "picturesque" only to refer to an established visual system of mediation. It is quite reasonable to assume that, when he wrote something like "picturesque old fellows," he was less interested in foregrounds and backgrounds and more vaguely invested in the general ideas associated with Gilpin's picturesque, roughness and irregularity.…”