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. "Ingrateful sure, When such the theme, becomes the poet's task: Yet must he try by modulation meet Of varied cadence and selected phrase Exact yet free, without inflation bold, To dignify that theme." Accordingly he dignified his theme by speaking of a net as the "sportsman's hempen toils," and of a gun as the "--fell tube Whose iron entrails hide the sulphurous blast Satanic engine!" When he names an ice-house, it is under a form of conundrum: