. . The taste of the citizen and
of the mere peasant are in all respects the same: the former gilds his
balls, paints his stonework and statues white, plants his trees in lines
or circles, cuts his yew-trees, four-square or conic, or gives them what
he can of the resemblance of birds or bears or men; squirts up his
rivulets in _jets d'eau_; in short, admires no part of nature but her
ductility; exhibits everything that is glaring, that implies expense, or
that effects a surprise because it is unnatural. The peasant is his
admirer. . . Water should ever appear as an irregular lake or winding
stream. . . Hedges, appearing as such, are universally bad. They
discover art in nature's province."

There is surely a correspondence between this new taste for picturesque
gardening which preferred freedom, variety, irregularity, and naturalness
to rule, monotony, uniformity, and artifice, and that new taste in
literature which discarded the couplet for blank verse, or for various
stanza forms, which left the world of society for the solitudes of
nature, and ultimately went, in search of fresh stimulus, to the remains
of the Gothic ages and the rude fragments of Norse and Celtic antiquity.

Both Walpole and Mason speak of William Kent, the architect and landscape
painter, as influential in introducing a purer taste in the gardener's
art. Kent was a friend of Pope and a _protege_ of Lord Burlington to
whom Pope inscribed his "Epistle on the Use of Riches," already quoted
(see _ante_ p. 121), and who gave Kent a home at his country house. Kent
is said to have acknowledged that he caught his taste in gardening from
the descriptive passages in Spenser, whose poems he illustrated. Walpole
and Mason also unite in contrasting with the artificial gardening of
Milton's time the picture of Eden in "Paradise Lost:"

"--where not nice art in curious knots,
But nature boon poured forth on hill and dale
Flowers worthy of Paradise; while all around
Umbrageous grots, and caves of cool recess,
And murmuring waters, down the slope dispersed,
Or held by fringed banks in crystal lakes.
Compose a rural seat of various hue."

But it is worth noting that in "L'Allegro" "retired leisure," takes his
pleasure in "_trim_ gardens," while in Collins,

"Ease and health retire
To breezy lawn or forest deep."

Walpole says that Kent's "ruling principle was that nature abhors a
straight line." Kent "leaped