nd the couplets which Pope wrote: just such an analogy as
exists between the whole classical school of poetry and the Italian
architecture copied from Palladio and introduced in England by Inigo
Jones and Christopher Wren. Grounds were laid out in rectangular plots,
bordered by straight alleys, sometimes paved with vari-colored sand, and
edged with formal hedges of box and holly. The turf was inlaid with
parterres cut in geometric shapes and set, at even distances, with yew
trees clipped into cubes, cones, pyramids, spheres, sometimes into
figures of giants, birds, animals, and ships--called "topiary work"
(_opus topiarium_). Terraces, fountains, bowling-greens (Fr.
_boulingrin_) statues, arcades, quincunxes, espallers, and artificial
mazes or labyrinths loaded the scene. The whole was inclosed by a wall,
which shut the garden off from the surrounding country.

"When a Frenchman reads of the Garden of Eden," says Horace Walpole, in
his essay "On Modern Gardening" (written in 1770, published in 1785), "I
do not doubt but he concludes it was something approaching to that of
Versailles, with clipped hedges, _berceaux_ and trellis work. . . The
measured walk, the quincunx and the _etoile_ imposed their unsatisfying
sameness on every royal and noble garden. . . Many French groves seem
green chests set upon poles. . . In the garden of Marshal de Biron at
Paris, consisting of fourteen acres, every walk is buttoned on each side
by lines of flower-pots, which succeed in their seasons. When I saw it,
there were nine thousand pots of asters, or _la reine Marguerite_. . .
At Lady Orford's, at Piddletown, in Dorsetshire, there was, when my
brother married, a double enclosure of thirteen gardens, each I suppose
not much above a hundred yards square, with an enfilade of correspondent
gates; and before you arrived at these, you passed a narrow gut between
two stone terraces that rose above your head, and which were crowned by a
line of pyradmidal yews. A bowling green was all the lawn admitted in
those times: a circular lake the extent of magnificence."[31]

Walpole names Theobalds and Nonsuch as famous examples of the old formal
style of garden; Stourhead, Hagley, and Stowe--the country seat of
Lyttelton's brother-in-law, Lord Cobham--of the new. He says that
mottoes and coats of arms were sometimes cut in yew, box, and holly. He
refers with respect to a recent work by the Rev. Thomas Whately, or
Wheatley, "Observations on Mo