Pope carried out these ideas as well as he could in his garden at
Twickenham, where he attempted to compress every variety of scenic effect
within the space of five acres, so that it became a kind of melodramatic
peep-show. The professional landscape-gardeners worked on a larger
scale; the two chief of them perhaps were Bridgeman, who invented the
haha for the purpose of concealing the bounds; and William Kent, Pope's
associate and contemporary, who disarranged old gardens, and designed
illustrations for Spenser's _Faerie Queene_. Kent was an architect and
bad painter, much favored by George I. Lord Chesterfield compares him to
Apelles, who alone was permitted to paint the portrait of Alexander:
Equal your varied wonders! save
This difference we see,
One would no other painter have--
No other would have thee.
From 1716 onward he was much employed by the Earl of Burlington. He
helped to lay out Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, with a fresh and surprising
view at every turn; the wandering visitor was introduced, among other
delights, to the Hermitage, the Temple of Venus, the Egyptian pyramid,
St. Augustine's cave (artfully constructed of roots and moss), the Saxon
Temple, the Temple of Bacchus, and Dido's cave. The craze for romantic
gardening, with its illusions of distance, and its ruins and groves,
persisted throughout the eighteenth century. Shenstone's garden at The
Leasowes enjoyed a higher reputation even than his poetry, and it is well
known how he strained his slender means in the effort to outshine his
neighbors.
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