“His gardens next your admiration call,
    On every side you look, behold the wall! 
    No pleasing intricacies intervene,
    No artful wildness to perplex the scene;
    Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother,
    And half the platform just reflects the other. 
    The suffering eye inverted nature sees,
    Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees;
    With here a fountain, never to be played;
    And there a summer house, that knows no shade;
    Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bowers;
    There gladiators fight, or die in flowers;
    Unwatered see the drooping sea-horse mourn,
    And swallows roost in Nilus’ dusty urn.”

Still the criticism is not merely fanciful which discovers an analogy between the French garden, with its trim regularity and artificial smoothness, and 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]