Lan 418.10

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

OCT 29 1990

400021

J. G. Barnard, Printer, Skinner Street, London.

NAB 1000

P136

PREFACE

TO THE FIRST VOLUME.

As the general plan and intention of my first publication have been a good deal misunderstood, I wish to give a short account of them both.

The title itself might have shewn, that I aimed at something more than a mere book of gardening; some, however, have conceived that I ought to have begun by setting forth all my ideas of lawns, shrubberies, gravel-walks &c.; and as my arrangement did not coincide with their notions of what it ought to have been, they seem to have concluded that I had no plan at all.

I have in this Essay, undertaken to treat of two subjects, distinct, but intimately, connected; and which, as I conceive, throw a reciprocal light on each other. I have begun with that which is last mentioned in the title, as I thought some previous discussion with regard to pictures and picturesque scenery, would most naturally lead to a particular examination of the character itself. In the first chapter, I have stated the general reasons' for studying the works of eminent landscape painters, and the principles of their art, with a view to the improvement of real scenery; and in order to shew how little those works, or the principles they contain, have been attended to, I have supposed the scenery in the landscape of a great painter, to be new modelled according to the taste of Mr. Brown. Having shewn this contrast between dressed scenery, and a picture of the most or

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