8o THE FORMAL GARDEN IN ENGLAND iv 



buried within the narrow limits of a high wall 

 upon the trifling and diminutive beauties of 

 greens and flowers (should be) lightly spread 

 over great and extensive parks and forests." 

 The designs which he furnishes are very intri- 

 cate and tedious. He points out that his 

 system " cashiers those interlacings of boxwork 

 and such-like trifling ornaments" (and appar- 

 ently flowers as well), and there is some ugly 

 cant about " natural and poHte gardening," 

 which is ominous of what was to follow. 

 Indeed, the change was now fairly on the 

 way. Bridgeman, another well-known gardener 

 of the time who succeeded Wise as gardener to 

 George I., abandoned " verdant sculpture," as 

 Horace Walpole calls it, though he still 

 trimmed his hedgerows. The abuse and per- 

 version of the good old custom of pleaching 

 was a sign of decay. Garden design had reached 

 the full development of which it was capable 

 by the end of the seventeenth century ; it was 

 growing stereotyped ; it became familiar, though 

 incomprehensible, to the man of letters and the 

 amateur, and the latter at once set to work to 

 pull it to pieces. 



It now became the fashion to rave about 

 nature, and to condemn the straightforward 

 work of the formal school as so much brutal 

 sacrilege. Pope and Addison led the way, with 

 about as much love of nature as the elegant 

 Abbe Delille some three generations later. 



