262 



birth and death are alike unknown. Walpole is the chief of his 

 remembrancers. After London and Wise, he observes, 

 *' Bridg-eman was the next fashionable designer of Gardens 

 and was for more chaste, he banished verdant sculpture, and 

 did not even revert to the square precision of the foregoing age. 

 lie enlarged his plans, disdained to make every division tally 

 to its oj)posi(e, and though he still adhered much to strait 

 walks with high dipt hedges, they were only his great lines ; 

 the rest he diversified by wilderness, and with loose groves of 

 oak, though still within surrounding hedges. I have observed 

 in the Gardens at Gubbins in Hertfordshire, the seat of the late 

 Sir Jeremy Sambrooke, many detached thoughts, that strongly 

 indicate the dawn of modern taste. As his reformation gained 

 footing, he ventured farther, and in the Royal Garden at Rich- 

 mond, dared to introduce cultivated fields, and even morsels of 

 a forest ai)pearance. But this was not till other innovators had 

 broke loose too from rigid symmetry." But above all the sunk 

 fence was now introduced as a boundary instead of Walls and 

 other opaque partitions, this ¥/alpole also attributes to Bridge- 

 man, and was as he justly observes the leading step to still 

 wifler extending improvements, for the contiguous ground with- 

 out the fence, must be made to harmonize with the garden it 

 was made to extend from. One of the first gardens laid out in 

 this style was that of the father of Mr. Walpole, at Houghton. 

 It contained three-and-tweuty acres and was from the designs 

 of a Mr. Eyre, an imitator of Bridgeman. To these succeeded 

 Kent, who painter enough to appreciate the charms of Land- 

 scape, bold and opinionative enough to dare and to dictate, had 

 genius sufficient to strike out a great system from the twilight 

 of imperfect essays. Mahomet imagined an Elisium, but Kent 

 created many.* 



WILLIAM KENT was born in Yorkshire in 1685. He 

 was apprenticed to a Coach Paiuter, but aspiring to a higher 



• Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting, &c. 



