DAWN OF LANDSCAPE GARDENING 229 



extreme, and have no arrangement, or no straight lines of any 

 sort, in a garden. Two years later Pope settled at Twickenham, 

 and his Villa there, far from being in the simple style he 

 admired, became a complicated piece of mimicry of rural 

 scenery of all sorts. He took infinite pains in planning and 

 planting. " I thank God," he wrote in a letter to a friend, 

 " for every wet day and for every fog, that gives me a headache, 

 but prospers my work." His famous grotto, " composed of 

 marbles, spars, gems, ores, and minerals," was the amusement 

 of his declining years. It could hardly lay claim to being 

 " natural," for nothing more fantastical can be imagined, 

 although in Pope's own lines to his grotto, he invites the 

 stranger thus : " Approach ! Great Nature studiously behold." 



Addison lived at one time at Bilton, in Warwickshire, and 

 his garden there is not in a " natural style " either. Part of 

 the garden dates from 1623 ; some of it was altered early in the 

 nineteenth century, but the arbour used by Addison is still 

 there. It is of classical " Queen Anne " style of architecture, 

 with a straight bench, facing a view of the garden, with 

 nothing rustic about it. There are still, however, in the 

 garden, two old cut yew arbours, also good yew and holly 

 hedges. 



Bridgeman, the other designer of this date, who followed up 

 the ideas of these two writers, was not himself an author like 

 Switzer, so one must look at his work to judge of his ideas. 

 Walpole, writing some years later, praises Bridgeman very 

 highly. He was the successor to London and Wise in the 

 charge of the Royal Gardens, and was, writes Walpole, " far 

 more chaste " than his predecessors. " He enlarged his plans, 

 disdained to make every division tally to its opposite, and 

 though he still adhered much to strait walks with high dipt 

 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 gardens at 

 Gubbins, in Hertfordshire, the seat of the late Sir Jeremy 

 Sambrooke, many detached thoughts, that strongly indicate the 

 dawn of modern taste. As his reformation gained footing, he 

 ventured farther, and in the Royal Garden at Richmond dared 

 to introduce cultivated fields, and even morsels of a forest 



