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 
levelling, 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 feeling 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 Lahor 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 civilized 
Europe, and now there was an attempt to shake off the shackles 
of its exaggerated formalism. The poets of the age were also 
