In exterior decoration the Chinese influence was equally subtle. Temple, Addison, and Pope, the early advocates of landscape gardening, were followed by Charles Bridgeman, William Kent, and Batty Langley. The simple rules of architecture, proportion and symmetry, were subverted; straight lines were displaced by mazes and curves; and people gradually preferred the novel and whimsical to what had been considered as elegant. The royal garden at Kensington may be regarded as a witness to the various styles of the art that came into being. It had been during the reign of William and Mary laid out by London and Wise in the prevailing Frenco-Dutch fashion of trimmed hedging, figured flower-beds, and formal walks. When it became the solitary

residence of Queen Anne, Sir Christopher Wren built the stately red and yellow "Orangerie, or artificial Green house," where Her Majesty sometimes "took tea", watching her gardeners at work on the geometric plots. In the next age, they were favored by the resorting of Caroline of Ausbach, the poets` "darling of the land," under whose auspices Bridgeman and Kent were busy, substituting stretches of lawn for "scrolled-work" parterres, groves for "verdant sculptures," and avenues for "square precision." By Bridgeman, who clipped his hedge "with a difference," was introduced the "ha-ha," or sunk fence, the pictorial effect of which was practically to annex the outlying country to the enclosure. With WM. Kent in the next regime, Queen Anne`s trimmed gardens successively disappeared; and tree-shaded walk and vistas into the park began to open in all directions. Slopes were softened; hollows gently lifted; a revolving temple rose from a "spectacular Mount"; the round pound was evolved; the string of West Bourne Pools became the conspicuous Serpentine and the Broad Walk was laid. Thus, by gradual and almost imperceptible degrees, came into existence the full-leaved and umbrageous Kensington Gardens.It was in this new style that Shenstone`s Leasowes, Lyttleton`s Hagley, Hamilton`s Pain`s-Hill, to mention but a few, were laid out. And with the advent of "Capability" Brown, beauties of the old regime began to be swept away, as few people had strength of mind enough to resist "the omnipotent magician."

Under these circumstances the introduction of Chinese gardening was opportune. In the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses for 1749 (tome XXVII) appears a "Description de la Maison de Plaisance de L`Empereur de la Chine," by Pere Jean Denis Attire (1743), an artist at the court of Kien-Lung. Father Attiret stressed that Yuan Ming Yuan was irregular, that there were no straight avenues and alleys but twisting walks, and that the very bright "benerally wind about and serpentine". This passage provoked Horace Walpole to remark that the Chinese garden are as whimsically irregular as European garden are formally uniform, and unvaried — but wish regard to nature, it seems as much avoided as in the squares and oblongs and straight lines of ours ancestors … Even their bright must not be strait — they serpentine as much as the rivulets, and sometimes as long as to be furnished with resting-places, and begin and end with triumphal arches. Methinks a strait canal is as rational at Least as a meandering bridge. The abridged translation in English, entitled "An Account of the Emperor of China`s Garden at Pekin," was published, in 1752, by Joseph Spence, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, under the pseudonym of "Sir Harry Beaumont." An enthusiastic gardener himself, spent much time in his retreat, where he was actually working at the time of his sudden death. His fondness for the Chinese garden it is easy to explain. He had in his Polymetis (1747) attempted to remove the barriers between the arts, emphasizing in particular the close connection of painting with poetry. And in the Chinese garden he found an instance des genres —mélange gems of the mélange of painting, poetry, and architecture — the spacious garden, "as big as Dijon," having shrines with varnish-work, and paintings; pleasure houses, huge enough for the greatest nobleman in Europe with his retinue; running streams with various turnings and windings, adorned on the sides with pavilions, charming grottoes, flowery trees; hunch-back bridges, either of brick, free stone, or wood, finely wrought, winding about and serpentining to such a degree that a bridge of one or two hundred feet long covers a distance of only thirty or forty feet; gates, walls, parapets, towers, temples, battlements, royal farms. There is nothing in poetry or romance," comments the Royal Magazine, "or even in the tales of fairies, that comes near the uncommon grandeur and variety which is to be met with in this elegant retreat."