ON CHINESE GARDENS. 279 



they plant, instead of flowers, sweet herbs, celery, carrots, pota- 

 toes, strawberries, scarlet beans, nasturtiums, endive, cucumbers, 

 melons, pineapples, or other handsome fruits and vegetables ; while 

 all the less sightly productions for the kitchen, are carefully hid 

 behind espaliers of fruit-trees. And thus, they say, every farmer 

 may have a Garden without expense : and, that if all landholders 

 were men of taste, the world might be formed into one continued 

 Garden, without difficulty. 



Such is the substance of what I have hitherto collected relative 

 to the Gardens of the Chinese. My endeavours, in this Article, 

 have been to give the general outline of their style of Gard- 

 ening, without entering into trifling particulars, and without 

 enumerating many little rules of which the Artists occasionally 

 avail themselves ; being pursuaded that, to men of genius, such 

 minute discriminations are always unnecessary, and often preju- 

 dicial, as they burden the memory, and clog the imagination with 

 superfluous restrictions. 



The dispositions and different artifices before mentioned, 

 are those which are chiefly practised in China, and such as best 

 characterize their style of Gardening. But the artists of that 

 country are so inventive, and so various in their combinations 

 that no two of their compositions are ever alike : they never 

 copy nor imitate each other ; they do not even repeat their own 

 productions ; saying, that what has once been seen, operates 

 feebly at a second inspection ; and that whatever bears even a dis- 

 tant resemblance to a known object, seldom excites a new idea. 

 The reader is therefore not to imagine that what has been related 

 is all that exists ; on the contrary, a considerable number of other 

 examples might have been produced : but those that have been 

 offered, will probably be sufficient : more especially as most of 

 them are like certain compositions in music, which, though, sim- 

 ple in themselves, suggest, to a fertile imagination, an endless 

 succession of complicated variations. 



To the generality of Europeans, many of the foregoing descrip- 

 tions may seem improbable ; and the execution of what has been 

 described, in some measure impracticable : but those who are bet- 

 ter acquainted with the East, know that nothing is too great for 

 Eastern magnificence to attempt ; and there can be few impossi- 

 bilities, where treasures are inexhaustible, where power is 

 unlimited and where munificence has no bounds. 



