244 A HISTORY OF GARDENING IN ENGLAND 



common people called them Ha ! Ha's ! to express their 

 surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their 

 walk." " No sooner was this simple enchantment made, than 

 leveUing, mowing, and rolling, followed. The contiguous 

 ground of the park without the sunk fence was to be harmo- 

 nized with the lawn within ; and the garden in its turn was to 

 be set free from its prim regularity, that it might assort with 

 the wilder country without. ... 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. He felt the delicious contrast of hill and 

 valley changing imperceptibly into each other, tasted the 

 beauty of the gentle swell, or concave scoop, and remarked 

 how loose groves crowned an easy eminence with happy 

 ornament, and while they called in the distant view between 

 their graceful stems, removed and extended the perspective by 

 delusive comparison." 



This shows the ideal which Kent was striving after. To 

 copy Nature was the aim of the new school : " Nature abhors a 

 straight line," was one of Kent's ruling principles, so avenues 

 and straight walks and hedges were an eyesore to him, and 

 this feehng of dislike was shared by other landscape gardeners. 

 Batty Langley wrote : " To be condemned to pass along the 

 famous vista from Moscow to Petersburg, or that other from 

 Agra to Labor in India, must be as disagreeable a sentence, as 

 to be condemned to labour at the gallies. I conceiv'd some 

 idea of the sensation . . . from walking but a few minutes, 



immured, betwixt Lord D 's high shorn yew hedges." 



This is but a specimen of the exaggerated language in which 

 the new school of gardeners expressed their contempt for the 

 work of their predecessors. 



This passion for the imitation of Nature was part of the 

 general reaction which was taking place, not only in gardening, 

 but in the world of letters and of fashion. The extremely 

 artificial French taste had for long taken the lead in civihzed 

 Europe, and now there was an attempt to shake off the shackles 

 of its exaggerated formalism. The poets of the age were also 



