Pope’s “Fourth Epistle” in 1731 marks an epoch in English garden literature, not because he says anything new but because of the great weight of his name and because of the high literary quality of the poem. Pope’s scornful picture of the formal garden sums up most of the characteristics objected to by earlier writers: His gardens next your admiration call, On every side you look, behold the wall! 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: Here Amphitrite sails through myrtle bowers; There gladiators fight, or die, in flowers; Unwatered see the drooping sea-horse mourn, And swallows roost in Nilus’ dusty urn. Pope also gives explicit support to the theories of the landscape gardeners. In the lines, He gains all points who pleasingly confounds, Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds, are given, he said, in concise form the three heads to which all rules of gardening are reducible, namely “the contrasts, the management of surprises, and the concealment of bounds.” The fundamental distinction between Pope’s conception of a garden and that of the formal school rests in the fact that Pope would seek to conceal or obscure all traces of man’s interference with Nature, while Nature’s ductility or manageableness was frankly shown in the formal garden and constituted one of its charms. Pope was also definitely in line with the landscape gardeners in his belief that the garden should melt imperceptibly into the surrounding park scenery. “Conceal art,” “destroy boundaries,” “imitate Nature,” these were Pope’s maxims and they sum up the doctrines of the new school. The three professional gardeners who established the landscape school were Bridgeman, Kent, and Brown. To the first of these Horace Walpole gives much credit. After commenting on the gardens of London and Wise he says,