The art of gardening, like architecture, has had two main schools, that might be styled the Classic and the Gothic. The ancient model, flourishing longer on the Continent, dealt in straight lines and formal shapes, in parallel rows, accurate vistas and such trim patterns as the star and the quincunx. This prospered in England while our mediæval buildings were being replaced by Palladian structures. Our first great gardens of that period seem to have copied the conceits of the Italian style, with its terraces, balustrades, stairways, arcades, and stiff arbours among walls of clipped hedge. Le Nôtre in the seventeenth century headed in France a school of geometric gardening on a large scale, which spread across the Channel. William III. patronised among us the Dutch ideas of quaint formalism, especially shown in thickets of box and yew. Now came into great favour the Topiarian monstrosities of “verdant sculpture” still kept up here and there, notably in the Lakeland gardens of Levens Hall. So, in the age of Queen Anne, English gardens had fallen into the conventional affectation satirised by Pope. 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. About the same time the _Spectator_ complains: “Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids. We see the marks of the scissors upon every plant and bush. I do not know whether I am singular in my opinion, but for my own part, I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure; and cannot but fancy that an orchard in flower looks infinitely more delightful than all the little labyrinths of the most finished parterre.” But Addison rather surprises us by pointing abroad for better models “in an agreeable mixture of garden and forest, which represent everywhere an artificial rudeness, much more charming than that neatness and elegancy which we meet with in those of our own country.” [Illustration: IN THE ITALIAN GARDEN]