masses, no meagre and frittered patches. As materials for landscape, they noticed, and often sketched, wherever they met with. them, the happiest groups, whether of trees, standing alone, or mixed with thickets and underwood; observing the manner in which they accorded with and displayed the character of the ground, and produced intricacy, variety, and connection. All that has just been mentioned, is as much an object of study to the improver, as to the painter: the former, indeed, though in some parts he may preserve the appearance of wildness and of neglect, in others must soften it, and in others again exchange it for the highest degree of neatness: but there is no part where a connection between the different objects is not required, or where a just degree of intricacy and enrichment would interfere with neatness. Every professor, from Kent nearly down to the present time, has proceeded on directly opposite principles: the first impression received from a place where one of them has been employed, is that of general bareness, and

particular heaviness and distinctness; indeed their dislike or neglect of enrichment, variety, intricacy, and above all of connection, is apparent throughout. Water, for instance, particularly requires enrichment; they make it totally naked: the boundaries in the same degree require variety and intricacy; they make them almost regularly circular and lastly, as it calls for all the improver's art to give connection to the trees in the open parts, they make them completely insulated. One of their first operations is to clear away the humbler trees, those bonds of connection which the painter admires, and which the judicious improver always touches with a cautious hand; for however minute and trifling the small connecting ties and bonds of scenery may appear, they are those by which the more considerable objects in all their different arrangements are combined, and on which their balance, their contrast, and diversity, as well as union depends*.

It would be hardly less absurd to throw out all the connecting particles in language, as unworthy of being

Water, when accompanied by trees and bushes variously arranged, is often so im perceptibly united with land, that in many places the eye cannot discover the perfect spot and time of their union; yet is no less delighted with that mystery, than with the thousand reflections and intricacies which attend it. What is the effect, when those ties are not suffered to exist? You every where distinguish the exact line of separation; the water is bounded by a distinct and uniform edge of grass; the grass by a similar edge of wood; the trees, and often the house, are distinctly placed upon the grass; all separated from whatever might group with them, or take off from their solitary insulated appearance: in every thing you trace the hand of a mechanic, not the mind of a liberal artist.

I will now proceed to the particulars, and will beg the reader to keep in his mind

mixed with the higher parts of speech: our pages would then be a good deal like our places, when all the conjunctions, prepositions, &c. were cleared away, and the nouns and verbs clumped by themselves.

the ruling principle I have just described, and of which I shall display the different proofs and examples.

No professor of high reputation seems for some time to have appeared after Kent, till at length, that the system might be carried to its ne plus ultra (no very distant point) arose the famous Mr. Brown; who has so fixed and determined the forms and lines of clumps, belts, and serpentine canals, and has been so steadily imitated by his followers, that had the improvers been incorporated, their common seal, with a clump, a belt, and a piece of made water, would have fully expressed the whole of their science, and have served them for a model as well as a seal*.

*What Ariosto says of a grove of cypressess, has always struck me in looking at made places,

-che parean d'una stampa tutte impresse.

They seem cast in one mould, made in one frame;" so much so, that I have seen places on which large sums had been lavished, so completely out of harmony with the landscape around them, that they gave me the idea of having been made by contract in London, and then sent down in pieces, and put together on the spot.

It is very unfortunate that this great legislator of our national taste, whose laws still remain in force, should not have received from nature, or have acquired by education, more enlarged ideas. Claude Lorraine was bred a pastry-cook, but in every thing that regards his art as a painter, he had an elevated and comprehensive mind; nor in any part of his works can we trace the meanness of his original occupation. Mr. Brown was bred a gardener, and having nothing of the mind, or the eye of a painter, he formed his style (or rather his plan) upon the model of a parterre; and transferred its minute beauties, its little clumps, knots, and patches of flowers, the oval belt that surrounds it, and all its twists and crincum crancums, to the great scale of nature*.

* This ingenious device of magnifying a parterre, calls to my mind a story I heard many years ago. A country parson, in the county where I live, speaking of a gentleman of low stature, but of extremely pompous manners, who had just left the company, exclaimed, in the simplicity and admiration of his heart, "quite grandeur in miniature, I protest!" This compliment revened, would perfectly