attempt to reproduce nature. To be sure,
Pope had only five acres to experiment with, and that parklike scenery
which distinguishes the English landscape garden requires a good deal of
room. The art is the natural growth of a country where primogeniture has
kept large estates in the hands of the nobility and landed gentry, and in
which a passion for sport has kept the nobility and gentry in the country
a great share of the year. Even Shenstone--whose place is commended by
Mason--Shenstone at the Leasowes, with his three hundred acres, felt his
little pleasance rather awkwardly dwarfed by the neighborhood of
Lyttelton's big park at Hagley.

The general principle of the new or English school was to imitate nature;
to let trees keep their own shapes, to substitute winding walks for
straight alleys, and natural waterfalls or rapids for _jets d'eau_ in
marble basins. The plan upon which Shenstone worked is explained in his
"Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening"[36] (1764), a few sentences from
which will indicate the direction of the reform: "Landscape should
contain variety enough to form a picture upon canvas; and this is no bad
test, as I think the landscape painter is the gardener's best designer.
The eye requires a sort of balance here; but not so as to encroach upon
probable nature. A wood or hill may balance a house or obelisk; for
exactness would be displeasing. . . It is not easy to account for the
fondness of former times for straight-lined avenues to their houses;
straight-lined walks through their woods; and, in short, every kind of
straight line, where the foot has to travel over what the eye has done
before. . . To stand still and survey such avenues may afford some
slender satisfaction, through the change derived from perspective; but to
move on continually and find no change of scene in the least attendant on
our change of place, must give actual pain to a person of taste. . . I
conceived some idea of the sensation he must feel from walking but a few
minutes, immured between Lord D----'s high shorn yew hedges, which run
exactly parallel at the distance of about ten feet, and are contrived
perfectly to exclude all kind of objects whatsoever. . . The side trees
in vistas should be so circumstanced as to afford a probability that they
grew by nature. . . The shape of ground, the disposition of trees and
the figure of water must be sacred to nature; and no forms must be
allowed that make a discovery of art.