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 Modern 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 object lesson on the absurdity of didactic poetry.  Especially harrowing are the author’s struggles to be poetic while describing the various kinds of fences designed to keep sheep out of his inclosures.