BRITAIN AND FRANCE. l6TH TO l8TH CENTURY
thrown into a kind of gardens", and "A man might make a pretty
landscape of his own possessions'*. Pope followed Addison in a
contribution to The Guardian in 1713 and, more important still,
in his own miniature garden at Twickenham. However, when it
came to *'improving" Twickenham (to use the 18th-century term)
in 1719-25—another equally remarkable thing happened. These
earliest anti-French gardens were by no means landscape gardens in
the later sense. They were not Pope's "Nature unadorned". Their
plans with elaborately meandering paths and rills are of as artificial
an irregularity as Baroque regularity had been before. Or as
Horace Walpole put it in 1750: "There is not a citizen who doesn't
take more pains to torture his acre and a half into irregularities
than he formerly would have employed to make it as formal as his
cravat". Now all that, this "twisting and twirling" (to use Walpole's
words again), is evidently Rococo, and nearer in spirit to the
Bruchsal Rocaille than to those gardens of the later i8th century
which really tried to look like untouched nature. It is the English
version of Rococo—as characteristically English as Wren's Baroque
had been in comparison with Continental Baroque.
So while one remembers the grandeur and elegance of French
17th- and 18th-century architecture as urban all the way through—
for the straight avenues in the park of Versailles are urban in spirit
too—one should never forget in looking at the formality of English
Palladian houses between 1660 and 1760 that their complement is
the English garden. John Wood's Prior Park possesses such informal
natural grounds. Aiid even in the most urban developments of
Georgian England such as New Edinburgh and above all Bath
nature was close at hand and willingly admitted.
John Wood was the first after Inigo Jones to impose Palladian
uniformity on an English square as a whole. All the squares in
London and elsewhere laid out since 1660 had left it to each owner
of a house to have it designed as he liked, and it was only due to
the rule of taste in Georgian society that not one of these houses ever
violently clashed with its neighbours. John Wood now made one
palace front with central portico and secondary emphasis on the
corner blocks out of his Queen Square in Bath. That was in 1728.
Twenty-five years later he designed the Circus (1754-^. 1770),
again as a uniform theme. His son, the younger John Wood (died
1781), in the Royal Crescent of 1767-^:, 1775 (pi. xcv) broke open
the compactness of earlier squares and ventured to provide as the
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