ont, was designed, I believe, by Bridgman.
When Queen Caroline added nearly three hundred acres from Hyde Park to
the gardens at Kensington, they were laid out by him. He also laid out
the gardens at Shardeloes, near Amersham. Mr. Walpole thus mentions
Bridgman, after alluding to the shears having been applied to the lovely
wildness of nature: "Improvements had gone on, till _London_ and _Wise_
had stocked our gardens with giants, animals, monsters, coats of arms,
and mottos, in yew, box and holly. Absurdity could go no farther, and
the tide turned. _Bridgman_, the next fashionable designer of gardens,
was far more chaste; and whether from good sense, or that the nation had
been struck and reformed by the admirable paper in the Guardian, No.
173, he banished verdant sculpture, and did not even revert to the
square precision of the foregoing age. He enlarged his plans, disdained
to make every division tally to its opposite; and though he still
adhered much to straight walks with high clipped hedges, they were only
his great lines, the rest he diversified by wilderness and with loose
groves of oak, though still within surrounding hedges. I have observed
in the garden at Gubbins, in Hertfordshire, many detached thoughts, that
strongly indicate the dawn of modern taste. As his reformation gained
footing, he ventured farther, and in the royal garden at Richmond, dared
to introduce cultivated fields, and even morsels of a forest appearance,
by the sides of those endless and tiresome walks that stretched out of
one into another without intermission. But this was not till other
innovators had broke loose too from rigid symmetry. But the capital
stroke, the leading step to all that has followed, was (_I believe the
first thought was Bridgman's_) the destruction of walls for boundaries,
and the invention of fosses,--an attempt then deemed so astonishing,
that the common people called them ha! ha's! to express their surprise
at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk.[83] One of the
first gardens planted in this simple though still formal style, was my
father's at Houghton. It was laid out by Mr. Eyre, an imitator of
Bridgman."

PHILIP MILLER died at the age of eighty, and was emphatically styled by
foreigners _hortulanorum princeps_. Switzer bears testimony to his
"usual generosity, openness and freedom." Professor Martyn says, "he
accumulated no wealth from his respectable connection with the great, or
from the nu