The English essayists, notably Addison and Pope, were early exponents of a freer style of gardening. In “The Tatler” (August 31, 1710) Addison laughed the tulip mania out of court, and lightly set aside “the best ordered parterres” as of less charm than “a spot of daisies or banks of violets.” Slight as it is, this preference for the wild flower over the garden rarity, for fields and hedgerows over the choicest plant embroidery, strikes a new note in the garden literature of the eighteenth century. Two years later, in “The Spectator” for September 6, 1712, Addison gave an account of an imaginary garden evidently made to his taste and far enough removed from the formal garden. The irregularity and wildness of his flower-garden, the wandering rill that runs “as it would do in an open Field,”[541] the trees and shrubs growing freely, are what he prides himself upon. The whole picture is a plea for the “beautiful Wildness of Nature” as against “the nicer Elegancies of Art.” But Addison’s strongest utterance, and the one in which the theoretical side is most fully discussed is in “The Spectator” for June 25, 1712. In contrasting the works of Nature and Art, Nature is throughout given the preference. There is something more bold and masterly in the rough careless Strokes of Nature, than in the nice Touches and Embellishments of Art. The Beauties of the most stately Garden or Palace lie in a narrow Compass; the Imagination immediately runs them over, and requires something else to gratify her, but in the wide Fields of Nature the Sight wanders up and down without Confinement, and is fed with an infinite variety of Images, without any certain Stint or Number.... Our _British_ Gardeners, on the contrary, instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. 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. Pope followed up this attack in a wittier fashion in “The Guardian” (September 29, 1713). He, too, prefers “the amiable simplicity of unadorned nature” to “the nicer scenes of art.” Only people of the common level of understanding are, he thinks, “principally delighted with the little niceties and fantastical operations of art,” while “persons of genius .... are always most fond of nature.” His chief attack is on sculptured greens, and he gives a sarcastic account of a town gardener who was so skilful that he could cut “family pieces of men, women, or children,” and who had for sale the most elaborate greens. His catalogue was as follows: