the fence and saw that all nature was a
garden. He felt the delicious contrast of hill and valley, changing
imperceptibly into each other. . . and remarked how loose groves crowned
an easy eminence with happy ornament. . . The great principles on which
he worked were perspective and light and shade. . . But of all the
beauties he added to the face of this beautiful country, none surpassed
his management of water. Adieu to canals, circular basins, and cascades
tumbling down marble steps. . . The gentle stream was taught to
serpentine seemingly at its pleasure."[37] The treatment of the garden
as a part of the landscape in general was commonly accomplished by the
removal of walls, hedges, and other inclosures, and the substitution of
the ha-ha or sunken fence. It is odd that Walpole, though he speaks of
Capability Brown, makes no mention of the Leasowes, whose proprietor,
William Shenstone, the author of "The School-mistress," is one of the
most interesting of amateur gardeners. "England," says Hugh Miller, "has
produced many greater poets than Shenstone, but she never produced a
greater landscape gardener."

At Oxford, Shenstone had signalized his natural tastes by wearing his own
hair instead of the wig then (1732) universally the fashion.[38] On
coming of age, he inherited a Shropshire farm, called the Leasowes, in
the parish of Hales Owen and an annuity of some three hundred pounds. He
was of an indolent, retiring, and somewhat melancholy temperament; and,
instead of pursuing a professional career, he settled down upon his
property and, about the year 1745, began to turn it into a _ferme ornee_.
There he wooed the rustic muse in elegy, ode, and pastoral ballad,
sounding upon the vocal reed the beauties of simplicity and the vanity of
ambition, and mingling with these strains complaints of Delia's cruelty
and of the shortness of his own purse, which hampered him seriously in
his gardening designs. Mr. Saintsbury has described Shenstone as a
master of "the artificial-natural style of poetry."[39] His pastoral
insipidities about pipes and crooks and kids, Damon and Delia, Strephon
and Chloe, excited the scorn of Dr. Johnson, who was also at no pains to
conceal his contempt for the poet's horticultural pursuits. "Whether to
plant a walk in undulating curves and to place a bench at every turn
where there is an object to catch the view; to make water run where it
will be seen; to leave intervals where the eye wi