enhauer gives the philosophy of the
opposing styles as follows: "The great distinction between the English
and the old French garden rests, in the last analysis, upon this, viz.,
that the former are laid out in the objective, the latter in the
subjective sense, that is to say, in the former the will of Nature, as it
manifests (_objektivirt_) itself in tree, mountain, and water, is brought
to the purest possible expression of its ideas, _i.e._, of its own being.
In the French gardens, on the other hand, there is reflected only the
will of the owner who has subdued Nature, so that, instead of her own
ideas, she wears as tokens of her slavery, the forms which he has forced
upon her-clipped hedges, trees cut into all manner of shapes, straight
alleys, arched walks, etc."

It would be unfair to hold the false taste of Pope's generation
responsible for that formal style of gardening which prevailed when "The
Seasons" was written. The old-fashioned Italian or French or Dutch
garden--as it was variously called--antedated the Augustan era, which
simply inherited it from the seventeenth century. In Bacon's essay on
gardens, as well as in the essays on the same subject by Cowley and Sir
William Temple, the ideal pleasure ground is very much like that which Le
Notre realized so brilliantly at Versailles.[30] Addison, in fact, in
the _Spectator_ (No. 414) and Pope himself in the _Guardian_ (No. 173)
ridiculed the excesses of the reigning mode, and Pope attacked them again
in his description of Timon's Villa in the "Epistle to the Earl of
Burlington" (1731), which was thought to be meant for Canons, the seat of
the Duke of Chandos.

"His gardens next your admiration call,
On every side you look, behold the wall!
No pleasing intricacies intervene,
No artful wildness to perplex the scene;
Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
And half the platform just reflects the other.
The suffering eye inverted nature sees,
Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees;
With here a fountain, never to be played;
And there a summer house, that knows no shade;
Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bowers;
There gladiators fight, or die in flowers;
Unwatered see the drooping sea-horse mourn,
And swallows roost in Nilus' dusty urn."

Still the criticism is not merely fanciful which discovers an analogy
between the French garden, with its trim regularity and artificial
smoothness, a