CHAPTER XI 



THE ENGLISH LANDSCAPE SCHOOL AND 

 ITS INFLUENCE ON THE CONTINENT 



ONDON and Wise, whose work we have already con- 

 sidered in Chapter VIII, were succeeded as garden 

 designers by their pupil Stephen Switzer, the author 

 of Ichnographia Rustica and other important works on 

 gardening. The old formal gardens were ruthlessly, 

 destroyed in the extraordinary but not incompre- 

 hensible reaction against all kinds of formahsm 

 that marked the middle and latter half of the eighteenth century. The 

 ■formal school had undoubtedly overstepped the mark with their monoton- 

 ous statues and vases and their excesses in topiary work or " verdant 

 sculpture " and soon fell a prey to the scathing criticism of Addison and 

 Pope. The former, in his essays contributed to the Spectator on the " Plea- 

 sures of a Garden," complains that British gardeners instead of humouring 

 nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. He objected to " trees 

 rising in cones, globes, and pyramids " and says that " he would rather look 

 upon. a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches," 

 while Pope complained that the grand manner of gardening was contrary 

 to the simplicity of Homer. " We seem to make it our study " he says, " to- 

 recede from Nature, not only in the various tonsure of greens into the most 

 regular and formal shapes, but even in monstrous attempts beyond the reach 

 of the art itself. We run into sculpture, and are yet better pleased to have 

 our trees in the most awkward figures of men and animals, than in the most 

 regular of their own." Two years later he proceeded to lay out his fanciful 

 garden at Twickenham which, far from being on the simple lines he professed 



