Polite society ... requires palisades erected with the line and at the point of the shears. The green shades of these tufted birches and of those great oaks which were found at the birth of time, are in bad taste and worthy of the grossness of our fathers. Is not to think thus to prefer a painted face to the natural colour of a beautiful countenance? But the depravity of this judgment is discovered in our pictures and in our tapestries. Paint on one side a fashionable garden, and on the other one of those beautiful landscapes in which Nature spreads her riches undisguised; one will present a very tedious object, the other will charm you by its delight. You will be tired of the one at the first glance. You will never weary of looking at the other, such is the force of Nature to make itself beloved in spite of the pilferings and deceits of art.[551] There were doubtless many other evidences of a changing taste, but the book that most distinctly marks a new era is Batty Langley’s “New Principles of Gardening” in 1728. In his Introduction is the iconoclastic statement, “Nor is there any Thing more _shocking_ than a _stiff, regular Garden_ where after we have seen one quarter thereof, the very same is repeated in all the remaining Parts.” His campaign against regularity is consistently carried out through the book. He comments on some gardens that seem to him “forbidding” because laid out with “that abominable Mathematical Regularity and Stiffness, that nothing that’s bad could equal them.” And again, “Nor is there any Thing more ridiculous ... than a Garden which is regular.” Of straight walks and hedges he wrote, “To be condemned to pass along the famous vista from Moscow to Petersburg, or that other from Agra to Lahore in India, must be as disagreeable a sentence, as to be condemned to labor at the gallies. I conceived some idea of the sensation ... from walking but a few minutes, immured, betwixt Lord D----’s high shorn yew hedges.” He regards cutting down fine old oaks in order to make a regular garden as “a Crime of so high a Nature, as not to be pardon’d.” In planning his grounds he allows “no three trees to range together in a strait line.” He advises conducting the walks so that they shall lead through “small Enclosures of Corn ... Hop-Gardens ... Melon-Grounds ... Paddocks of Deer, Sheep, Cows, ... with rural Enrichments of Hay-Stacks, Wood-Piles, etc.” His final dictum is that all gardens must be “grand, beautiful, and natural.” He is thoroughly romantic in his idea of beauty, for not only is regularity debarred, but “misshapen Rocks, strange precipices, Mountains, old Ruins,” are counted as indispensable. If ruins cannot be actually found or built, he would even have them “painted on Canvas.” Batty Langley’s book is of especial importance since at so early a date it formulates many of the principles on which the landscape gardeners worked.