with other groups, to some apparently insignificant, and to many eyes, even ugly trees. To attend to all these niceties of outline, connection, and grouping, would require much time as well as skill, and therefore a more easy and compendious method has been adopted: the different groups are to be cleared round, till they become as clump-like as their untrained natures will allow; and even many of those outside trees which belong to the groups themselves, and to which they owe, not only their beauty, but their security against wind and frost, are cut down without pity, if they will not range according to a prescribed model; till mangled, starved, and cut off from all connection, these unhappy newly drilled corps

"Stand bare and naked, trembling at themselves."

Even the old avenue, whose branches had intertwined with each other for ages, must undergo this fashionable metamorphosis. The object of the improver is to

break its regularity; but so far from pro ducing that effect by dividing it into clumps, he could scarcely invent a method by which its regularity would be made so manifest in every direction. When entire, its straitness can only be seen when you look up or down it; viewed sideways, it has the appearance of a thick mass of wood: if you plant other trees before it, to them it gives consequence, and they give it lightness and variety; but when it is divided, and you can see through it, and compare the separate clumps with the objects before and behind them, the strait line is apparent from whatever point you view it. In its close array, the avenue is like the Grecian phalanx: each tree, like each soldier, is firmly wedged in between its companions; its branches, like their spears, present a front impenetrable to all attacks; but the moment this compact order is broken, their sides become naked and exposed. Mr. Brown, like another Paulus Æmilius, has broken the firm embodied ranks of many a noble phalanx of

trees, and in this, perhaps, more than in any other instance, he has shewn how far the perversion of taste may be carried; for at the very time when he deprived the avenue of its shade and its solemn grandeur, he increased its formality.

CHAPTER II.

IT is in the arrangement and management of trees, that the great art of improvement consists: earth is too cumbrous and lumpish for man to contend much with, and when worked upon, its effects are flat and dead like its nature. But trees, detaching themselves at once from the surface, and rising boldly into the air, have a more lively and immediate effect on the eye: they alone, form a canopy over us, and a varied frame to all other objects; which they admit, exclude, and group with, almost at the will of the improver.

In

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beauty, they not only far excel every thing of inanimate nature, but their beauty is complete and perfect in itself; while that of almost every other object requires their assistance. Without them, the most varied inequality of ground is uninteresting: rocks, though their variety is of a more striking kind, and often united with grandeur, still want their accompaniment: and although in the higher parts of mountains trees are neither expected nor required, yet if there' be none in any part of the view, a scene of mere barrenness and desolation, however grand, soon fatigues the eye. Water in all its characters of brooks, rivers, lakes, and water-falls, appears cold and naked without them: the sea alone forms an exception, its sublimity absorbing all idea of lesser ornaments; for no one can view the foam, the gulphs, the impetuous motion of that world of waters, without a deep impression of its destructive and irresistible power. But sublimity is not its only character; for after that first awful sensation is weakened by use, the infinite variety in