The general principle of the new or English school was to imitate nature; to let trees keep their own shapes, to substitute winding walks for straight alleys, and natural waterfalls or rapids for jets d’eau in marble basins.  The plan upon which Shenstone worked is explained in his “Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening"[36] (1764), a few sentences from which will indicate the direction of the reform:  “Landscape should contain variety enough to form a picture upon canvas; and this is no bad test, as I think the landscape painter is the gardener’s best designer.  The eye requires a sort of balance here; but not so as to encroach upon probable nature.  A wood or hill may balance a house or obelisk; for exactness would be displeasing. . .  It is not easy to account for the fondness of former times for straight-lined avenues to their houses; straight-lined walks through their woods; and, in short, every kind of straight line, where the foot has to travel over what the eye has done before. . .  To stand still and survey such avenues may afford some slender satisfaction, through the change derived from perspective; but to move on continually and find no change of scene in the least attendant on our change of place, must give actual pain to a person of taste. . .  I conceived some idea of the sensation he must feel from walking but a few minutes, immured between Lord D——­’s high shorn yew hedges, which run exactly parallel at the distance of about ten feet, and are contrived perfectly to exclude all kind of objects whatsoever. . .  The side trees in vistas should be so circumstanced as to afford a probability that they grew by nature. . .  The shape of ground, the disposition of trees and the figure of water must be sacred to nature; and no forms must be allowed that make a discovery of art. . .  The taste of the citizen and of the mere peasant are in all respects the same:  the former gilds his balls, paints his stonework and statues white, plants his trees in lines or circles, cuts his yew-trees, four-square or conic, or gives them what he can of the resemblance of birds or bears or men; squirts up his rivulets in jets d’eau; in short, admires no part of nature but her ductility; exhibits everything that is glaring, that implies expense, or that effects a surprise because it is unnatural.  The peasant is his admirer. . .  Water should ever appear as an irregular lake or winding stream. . .  Hedges, appearing as such, are universally bad.  They discover art in nature’s province.”

There is surely a correspondence between this new taste for picturesque gardening which preferred freedom, variety, irregularity, and naturalness to rule, monotony, uniformity, and artifice, and that new taste in literature which discarded the couplet for blank verse, or for various stanza forms, which left the world of society for the solitudes of nature, and ultimately went, in search of fresh stimulus, to the remains of the Gothic ages and the rude fragments of Norse and Celtic antiquity.