dern Gardening," 1770; and to a poem, then
and still in manuscript, but passages of which are given by Amherst,[32]
entitled "The Rise and Progress of the Present Taste in Planting Parks,
Pleasure Grounds, Gardens, etc. In a poetic epistle to Lord Viscount
Irwin," 1767.

Gray's friend and editor, the Rev. William Mason, in his poem "The
English Garden," 1757, speaks of the French garden as already a thing of
the past.

"O how unlike the scene my fancy forms,
Did Folly, heretofore, with Wealth conspire
To plant that formal, dull disjointed scene
Which once was called a garden! Britain still
Bears on her breast full many a hideous wound
Given by the cruel pair, when, borrowing aid
From geometric skill, they vainly strove
By line, by plummet and unfeeling shears
To form with verdure what the builder formed
With stone. . .
Hence the sidelong walls
Of shaven yew; the holly's prickly arms
Trimmed into high arcades; the tonsile box,
Wove in mosaic mode of many a curl
Around the figured carpet of the lawn. . .
The terrace mound uplifted; the long line
Deep delved of flat canal."[33]

But now, continues the poet, Taste "exalts her voice" and

"At the awful sound
The terrace sinks spontaneous; on the green,
Broidered with crisped knots, the tonsile yews
Wither and fall; the fountain dares no more
To fling its wasted crystal through the sky,
But pours salubrious o'er the parched lawn."

The new school had the intolerance of reformers. The ruthless Capability
Brown and his myrmidons laid waste many a prim but lovely old garden,
with its avenues, terraces, and sun dials, the loss of which is deeply
deplored, now that the Queen Anne revival has taught us to relish the
_rococo_ beauties which Brown's imitation landscapes displaced.

We may pause for a little upon this "English Garden" of Mason's, as an
example of that brood of didactic blank-poems, begotten of Phillips'
"Cyder" and Thomson's "Seasons," which includes Mallet's "Excursion"
(1728), Somerville's "Chase" (1734), Akenside's "Pleasures of
Imagination" (1742-44), Armstrong's "Art of Preserving Health" (1744),
Dyer's "Fleece" (1757) and Grainger's "Sugar Cane" (1764). Mason's blank
verse, like Mallet's, is closely imitative of Thomson's and the influence
of Thomson's inflated diction is here seen at its worst. The whole poem
is an objec