Joseph Warton, in his “Essay on Pope” (1756), testified that “The Seasons” had been “very instrumental in diffusing a taste for the beauties of nature and landscape.”  One evidence of this diffused taste was the rise of the new or natural school of landscape gardening.  This was a purely English art, and Gray, writing in 1763,[27] says “It is not forty years since the art was born among us; and it is sure that there was nothing in Europe like it”:  he adds that “our skill in gardening and laying out grounds” is “the only taste we can call our own, the only proof of our original talent in matter of pleasure.”  “Neither Italy nor France have ever had the least notion of it, nor yet do at all comprehend it, when they see it."[28] Gray’s “not forty years” carries us back with sufficient precision to the date of “The Seasons” (1726-30), and it is not perhaps giving undue credit to Thomson, to acknowledge him as, in a great measure, the father of the national school of landscape gardening.  That this has always been recognized upon the Continent as an art of English invention, is evidenced by the names Englische Garten, jardin Anglais, still given in Germany and France to pleasure grounds laid out in the natural taste.[29] Schopenhauer gives the philosophy of the opposing styles as follows:  “The great distinction between the English and the old French garden rests, in the last analysis, upon this, viz., that the former are laid out in the objective, the latter in the subjective sense, that is to say, in the former the will of Nature, as it manifests (objektivirt) itself in tree, mountain, and water, is brought to the purest possible expression of its ideas, i.e., of its own being.  In the French gardens, on the other hand, there is reflected only the will of the owner who has subdued Nature, so that, instead of her own ideas, she wears as tokens of her slavery, the forms which he has forced upon her-clipped hedges, trees cut into all manner of shapes, straight alleys, arched walks, etc.”

It would be unfair to hold the false taste of Pope’s generation responsible for that formal style of gardening which prevailed when “The Seasons” was written.  The old-fashioned Italian or French or Dutch garden—­as it was variously called—­antedated the Augustan era, which simply inherited it from the seventeenth century.  In Bacon’s essay on gardens, as well as in the essays on the same subject by Cowley and Sir William Temple, the ideal pleasure ground is very much like that which Le Notre realized so brilliantly at Versailles.[30] Addison, in fact, in the Spectator (No. 414) and Pope himself in the Guardian (No. 173) ridiculed the excesses of the reigning mode, and Pope attacked them again in his description of Timon’s Villa in the “Epistle to the Earl of Burlington” (1731), which was thought to be meant for Canons, the seat of the Duke of Chandos.