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ture : " Improvements had gone on, till London and Wise 

 had stocked our gardens with giants, animals, monsters, coats 

 of arms, and mottos, in yew, box and holly. Absurdity 

 could go no farther, and the tide turned. Bridgman, the 

 next fashionable designer of gardens, 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 at Gubbins, in Hertfordshire, 

 many detached thoughts, that strongly indicate the dawn of 

 modern taste. As his reformation gained footing, he ven- 

 tured farther, and in the royal garden at Richmond, dared 

 to introduce cultivated fields, and even morsels of a forest 

 appearance, by the sides of those endless and tiresome walks 

 that stretched out of one into another without intermission. 

 But this was not till other innovators had broke loose too 

 from rigid symmetry. But the capital stroke, the leading 

 step to all that has followed, was (I believe the first thought 

 was Bridgman's) the destruction of walls for boundaries, 

 and the invention of fosses, an attempt then deemed so 

 astonishing, that the common people called them ha ! ha's ! 

 to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived 

 check to their walk.* One of the first gardens planted in 

 this simple though still formal style, was my father's at 

 Houghton. It was laid out by Mr. Eyre, an imitator of 

 Bridgman.' 5 



* Mr. Garrick's fondness for ornamental gardening, induced him finely 

 to catch at this invention, in his inimitable performance of Lord Chalk- 

 stone. 



T 



