Both Walpole and Mason speak of William Kent, the architect and landscape painter, as influential in introducing a purer taste in the gardener’s art.  Kent was a friend of Pope and a protege of Lord Burlington to whom Pope inscribed his “Epistle on the Use of Riches,” already quoted (see ante p. 121), and who gave Kent a home at his country house.  Kent is said to have acknowledged that he caught his taste in gardening from the descriptive passages in Spenser, whose poems he illustrated.  Walpole and Mason also unite in contrasting with the artificial gardening of Milton’s time the picture of Eden in “Paradise Lost:” 

        “—­where not nice art in curious knots,
    But nature boon poured forth on hill and dale
    Flowers worthy of Paradise; while all around
    Umbrageous grots, and caves of cool recess,
    And murmuring waters, down the slope dispersed,
    Or held by fringed banks in crystal lakes. 
    Compose a rural seat of various hue.”

But it is worth noting that in “L’Allegro” “retired leisure,” takes his pleasure in “trim gardens,” while in Collins,

    “Ease and health retire
    To breezy lawn or forest deep.”

Walpole says that Kent’s “ruling principle was that nature abhors a straight line.”  Kent “leaped the fence and saw that all nature was a garden.  He felt the delicious contrast of hill and valley, changing imperceptibly into each other. . . and remarked how loose groves crowned an easy eminence with happy ornament. . .  The great principles on which he worked were perspective and light and shade. . .  But of all the beauties he added to the face of this beautiful country, none surpassed his management of water.  Adieu to canals, circular basins, and cascades tumbling down marble steps. . .  The gentle stream was taught to serpentine seemingly at its pleasure."[37] The treatment of the garden as a part of the landscape in general was commonly accomplished by the removal of walls, hedges, and other inclosures, and the substitution of the ha-ha or sunken fence.  It is odd that Walpole, though he speaks of Capability Brown, makes no mention of the Leasowes, whose proprietor, William Shenstone, the author of “The School-mistress,” is one of the most interesting of amateur gardeners.  “England,” says Hugh Miller, “has produced many greater poets than Shenstone, but she never produced a greater landscape gardener.”

At Oxford, Shenstone had signalized his natural tastes by wearing his own hair instead of the wig then (1732) universally the fashion.[38] On coming of age, he inherited a Shropshire farm, called the Leasowes, in the parish of Hales Owen and an annuity of some three hundred pounds.  He was of an indolent, retiring, and somewhat melancholy temperament; and, instead of pursuing a professional career, he settled down upon his property and, about the year 1745, began to turn it into a ferme ornee.  There he