the house, by open halls, pavilions, and colonnades. Every part of
it--from neat turf parterres bordered by box in front of the terrace,
designs worked out in flowers or coloured stones, and double rows of
orange spaliers, to groups of statues and fountains--belonged to one
symmetrical plan, the focus of which was the house, standing free
from trees, and visible from every point. Farther off, radiating
avenues led the eye in the same direction, and every little
intersecting alley, true to the same principle, ran to a definite
object--obelisk, temple, or what not. There was no lack of bowers,
giant shrubberies, and water-courses running canal-wise through the
park, but they all fell into straight lines; every path was ruled by
a ruler, the eye could follow it to its very end. Artifice was the
governing spirit. As Falke says: 'Nature dared not speak but only
supply material; she had to sacrifice her own inventive power to this
taste and this art. Hills and woods were only hindrances; the
straight lines of trees and hedges, with their medley of statues and
"cabinets de verdure," demanded level ground, and the landscape eye
of the period only tolerated woods as a finish to its cut and clipt
artificialities.'[13]

Trees and branches were not allowed to grow at their own sweet will;
they were cut into cubes, balls, pyramids, even into shapes of
animals, as the gardener's fancy or his principles decreed; cypresses
were made into pillars or hearts with the apex above or below; and
the art of topiary even achieved complete hunting scenes, with
hunters, stags, dogs, and hares in full chase on a hedge. Of such a
garden one could say with honest Claudius, ''Tis but a tailor's joke,
and shews the traces of the scissors; it has nothing of the great
heart of Nature.'