Absurdity could go no further and the tide turned. Bridgeman, the next fashionable designer of gardens, was far more chaste, and whether from good sense, or that the nation had been struck and reformed by the admirable paper in “The Guardian,” No. 173, he banished verdant sculpture, and did not even revert to the square precision of the foregoing age. He enlarged his plans, disdained to make every division tally to its opposite; and, though he still adhered much to straight walks with high clipped hedges, they were only his great lines, the rest he diversified by wilderness, and with loose groves of oak.... As his reformation gained footing he ventured further, and in the royal garden at Richmond dared to introduce cultivated fields, and even morsels of a forest appearance.... But the capital stroke, the leading step to all that has followed, was (I believe the first thought was Bridgeman’s) the destruction of walls for boundaries, and the invention of fossés--an attempt then deemed so astonishing that the common people called them Ha! Ha’s! to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk. Though Switzer gave early expression to the ideas praised by Walpole, Bridgeman was apparently the first to put these ideas into practice in any notable way. His work at Stow was complete some years before 1724, for in that year Lord Percival wrote, “Bridgeman laid out the ground and plan’d the whole, which can not fail of recommending him to business. What adds to the bewty of this garden is, that it is not bounded by walls, but by a Ha Ha, which leaves you the sight of a bewtifull woody country, and makes you ignorant how far the high planted walks extend.” William Kent (1685–1748) was Bridgeman’s successor at Stow, and here and in other great gardens, he made bold experiments along the lines rather timidly marked out by Bridgeman. Walpole says of Kent, “At that moment appeared Kent, painter enough to taste the charms of landscape, bold and opinionative enough to dare and to dictate, and born with a genius to strike out a great system from the twilight of imperfect essays. He leaped the fence and saw that all Nature was a garden.” Kent’s dominating principle, “Study Nature and follow her laws,” marked the completeness of his break with the formal schools, and was the basis of his best work, but it led also to absurdities. Since Nature apparently abhors a straight line, all paths and avenues and streams were sent serpentining around in the most tedious and unmeaning fashion. Francis Coventry said that no follower of Kent would be willing to go to heaven on a straight line. Kent even went so far, at one time, in his desire to follow Nature, as to plant dead trees in his parks. But, on the whole, his work was marked by a genuine love of Nature, and he at least succeeded, as Walpole says, in “routing _professed art_.”[552] [Illustration: HAGLEY PARK