en, therefore, we see
this imitated in any measure, it gives us a nobler and more exalted
kind of pleasure, than what we receive from the nicer and more
accurate productions of art. On this account our _English_ gardens
are not so entertaining to the fancy as those in _France_ and _Italy_,
where we see a larger extent of ground covered over with an agreeable
mixture of garden and forest, which represent everywhere an artificial
wildness, much more charming than that neatness and elegancy which we
meet with in those of our own country.

Addison would have hesitated to apply this doctrine to poetry; indeed the
orthodoxy of that age favored the highest possible contrast between the
orderly works of man, and the garden, which it chose to treat as the
outpost of rebellious nature. Pope was a gardener as well as a poet, and
his gardening was extravagantly romantic. He describes his ideal garden
in the _Epistle to the Earl of Burlington_:

Let not each beauty everywhere be spy'd,
Where half the skill is decently to hide.
He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,
Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds.
Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;
Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades;
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

Pope carried out these ideas as well as he could in his garden at
Twickenham, where he attempted to compress every variety of scenic effect
within the space of five acres, so that it became a kind of melodramatic
peep-show. The professional landscape-gardeners worked on a larger
scale; the two chief of them perhaps were Bridgeman, who invented the
haha for the purpose of concealing the bounds; and William Kent, Pope's
associate and contemporary, who disarranged old gardens, and designed
illustrations for Spenser's _Faerie Queene_. Kent was an architect and
bad painter, much favored by George I. Lord Chesterfield compares him to
Apelles, who alone was permitted to paint the portrait of Alexander:

Equal your varied wonders! save
This difference we see,
One would no other painter have--
No other would have thee.

From 1716 onward he was much employed by the Earl of Bur