features are among the noblest in the kingdom. In front, the sea appears in view, embayed amidst islands and promontories, and backed by mountains; between the house and the shore, there is a quick, though not an abrupt descent of ground, on which a judicious improver might have planted different masses of wood, groups, and single trees, more or less dispersed or connected together, with lawns and glades between them, gently leading the eye among their intricacies to the shore. This would have formed a rich and varied foreground to the magnificent distance; and in the approach to the seaside, which ever way you took, would have broken that distance, and have formed in conjunction with it, a number of new and beautiful compositions. One of Mr. Brown's successors has thought differently; and this uncommon display of scenery is disgraced by a belt. I do not remember the place in its unimproved state; but I was told that there was a great quantity of wood between the house and the sea, and that the vessels ap. peared, as at that wonderful place, Mount Edgecumbe, sailing over the tops, and gliding among the stems of the trees; if so, this professor "Has left sad marks of his destructive sway." The method of thinning trees which has been adopted by layers out of ground, perfectly corresponds with their method of planting; for in both cases they totally neglect, what in the general sense of the word may be called picturesque effects. Trees of remarkable size, indeed, usually escape; but it is not sufficient to attend to the giant sons of the forest: often the loss of a few trees, nay of a single tree of middling size, is of infinite consequence to the general effect of the place, by making an irreparable breach in the outline of a principal wood; often some of the most beautiful groups, owe the playful variety of their form, and their happy connection 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 |