Iborace Walpote 261 



till London and Wise had stocked our gardens 

 with giants, animals, monsters,* coats-of-arms, 

 and mottoes in yew, box, and holly. Absurd- 

 ity could go no further, and the tide turned. 

 Bridgman, the next fashionable designer of gar- 

 dens, was far more chaste, and whether from good 

 sense, or that the nation had been struck and 

 reformed by the admirable paper in the Guar- 

 dian, 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, 

 though still within surrounding hedges. I have 

 observed in the garden f at Gubbins, in Hert- 

 fordshire, many detached thoughts that strong- 

 ly indicate the dawn of modern taste. As his 

 reformation gained footing he ventured further, 

 and in the royal garden at Richmond dared to 



* On the piers of a garden gate, not far from Paris, I 

 observed two very coquet sphinxes. These lady mon- 

 sters had straw hats, gracefully smart on one side of 

 their heads, and silken cloaks half veiling their necks- 

 all executed in stone. 



f The seat of the late Sir Jeremy Sambroke. It had 

 formerly belonged to I^ady More, mother-in-law of Sir 

 Thomas More, and had been tyrannically wrenched 

 from her by Henry VIII. on the execution of Sir 

 Thomas, though not her son, and though her jointure 

 from a former husband. 



