Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bowers;
There gladiators fight, or die, in flowers;
Unwatered see the drooping sea-horse mourn,

And swallows roost in Nilus' dusty urn.

Pope also gives explicit support to the theories of the landscape gardeners. In the lines,

He gains all points who pleasingly confounds,

Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds,

are given, he said, in concise form the three heads to which all rules of gardening are reducible, namely "the contrasts, the management of surprises, and the concealment of bounds." The fundamental distinction between Pope's conception of a garden and that of the formal school rests in the fact that Pope would seek to conceal or obscure all traces of man's interference with Nature, while Nature's ductility or manageableness was frankly shown in the formal garden and constituted one of its charms. Pope was also definitely in line with the landscape gardeners in his belief that the garden should melt imperceptibly into the surrounding park scenery. "Conceal art," "destroy boundaries," "imitate Nature," these were Pope's maxims and they sum up the doctrines of the new school.

The three professional gardeners who established the landscape school were Bridgeman, Kent, and Brown. To the first of these Horace Walpole gives much credit. After commenting on the gardens of London and Wise he says,

Absurdity could go no further and the tide turned. Bridgeman, the next fashionable designer of gardens, was far more chaste, and whether from good sense, or that the nation had been struck and reformed by the admirable paper in "The Guardian," No. 173, he banished verdant sculpture, and did not even revert to the square precision of the foregoing age. He enlarged his plans, disdained to make every division tally to its opposite; and, though he still adhered much to straight walks with high clipped hedges, they were only his great lines, the rest he

diversified by wilderness, and with loose groves of oak. . . . As his reformation gained footing he ventured further, and in the royal garden at Richmond dared to introduce cultivated fields, and even morsels of a forest appearance. . . . . But the capital stroke, the leading step to all that has followed, was (I believe the first thought was Bridgeman's) the destruction of walls for boundaries, and the invention of fossésan attempt then deemed so astonishing that the common people called them Ha! Ha's! to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk.

Though Switzer gave early expression to the ideas praised by Walpole, Bridgeman was apparently the first to put these ideas into practice in any notable way. His work at Stow was complete some years before 1724, for in that year Lord Percival wrote, "Bridgeman laid out the ground and plan'd the whole, which can not fail of recommending him to business. What adds to the bewty of this garden is, that it is not bounded by walls, but by a Ha Ha, which leaves you the sight of a bewtifull woody country, and makes you ignorant how far the high planted walks extend."

William Kent (1685-1748) was Bridgeman's successor at Stow, and here and in other great gardens, he made bold experiments along the lines rather timidly marked out by Bridgeman. Walpole says of Kent, "At that moment appeared Kent, painter enough to taste the charms of landscape, bold and opinionative enough to dare and to dictate, and born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays. He leaped the fence and saw that all Nature was a garden." Kent's dominating principle, "Study Nature and follow her laws," marked the completeness of his break with the formal schools, and was the basis of his best work, but it led also to absurdities. Since Nature apparently abhors a straight line, all paths and avenues and streams were sent serpentining around in the most tedious and unmeaning fashion. Francis

Coventry said that no follower of Kent would be willing to go to heaven on a straight line. Kent even went so far, at one time, in his desire to follow Nature, as to plant dead trees in his parks. But, on the whole, his work was marked by a genuine love of Nature, and he at least succeeded, as Walpole says, in "routing professed art."

Kent's most important gardens come between 1730 and 1748. One of the first of those incited by the beauty of his "Elysian scenes" to make over their own domains was Lord Lyttleton. His estate, Hagley, was a ferme ornée much admired in its own day, and an excellent illustration of the new style. The accompanying print shows that the forest trees come close to the house and grow unfettered. There are open glades ornamented by temples and seats, and enlivened by the presence of animals, which, according to the new scheme of beauty, had at last come into their own as ornamental elements of a landscape. Philip Southcote's "Wooburn Farm" is another early ferme ornée. Charles Hamilton's "Pain's Hill," in Surrey, shows a somewhat different type, which Walpole calls "the forest or savage garden." In this garden, continues Walpole, "all is great and foreign and rude; the walks seem not designed, but cut through the wood of pines; and the style of the whole is so grand and conducted with so serious an air of wild and uncultivated extent, that when you look down on this seeming forest you are amazed to find it contain a very few acres." The approximate date of "Wooburn Farm" and "Pain's Hill" is determined by the fact that in 1761, in Dodsley's "London and its Environs," they are spoken of as "but lately laid out," and so not very much advanced in growth, but yet "very beautiful and

There is a discriminating eulogy of Kent by Francis Coventry in "The World," April 12, 1753. But see also Coventry's "Strictures on the Absurd Novelties Introduced into Gardening, and a Humorous Description of Squire Mushroom's Villa," "The World," November 15, 1753.