274 PRACTICAL GARDENING. 



house arbours, and diminutive lakes ; for, above all things, 

 we should lay it down as a rule, that nothing more should be 

 attempted than can be carried out upon a scale sufficiently 

 large to avoid any appearance of art. ]^othing can be more 

 contemptible than doing things on a small scale for the sake 

 of crowding more features into a landscape. We do not 

 mean to say that we are to have no rock smaller than Gibral- 

 tar ; and no lake less than Haarlem ; that our temples are to 

 be as gigantic as the Coliseum, or our rivers like the ]\Iis- 

 sissippi; but they are not to be less than nature supphes in 

 those scenes which excite our admii'ation within reach of our 

 ordinary sight ; and if there be only room for a plain land- 

 scape, it is folly to attempt more. We have seen on one acre 

 of ground three or four trumpery fountains ; one broad path 

 with a sweep quite landscape fashion ; some very trumpery 

 rock work, as if somebody had accidentally upset a cart-load of 

 stones ; a pond which would have been crowded by a dozen 

 or two of ducks ; a mound about as large as a good sized 

 dunghill, and on the top a temple, so called, which appeared 

 as if the children had left some of their playthings there ; we 

 had a shallow canal for the purpose of putting over it a rustic 

 bridge,- and at a remote corner — that is, as reuiote as it could 

 be in a place of eighty yards long — a summer-house ten feet 

 by six. But certainly the mansion and its appurtenances 

 were of a piece with the liliputian garden, which, by the way, 

 we had nearly said comprised all the styles — the geometric, 

 the Italian, the old English, and the landscape — and all in 

 sight at once ; reminding us of a tailor's pattern card, or the 

 shutters of a colour warehouse. The mansion was but one 

 story high ; and it had a conservatory, an observatory, a 

 picture gallery, coach-house, stables, servants' apartments over 

 the latter, even with the hay-loft, which held four trusses. 

 Then there was a farm-yard, with its little barn, cow-house, 

 hen-roost, hayrick — this was the produce of the lawn, and 

 might have filled a one-horse cart — a dairy, quite fanciful 

 with coloured glass windows to match the conservatory; a 

 kitchen-garden, which would have been twenty yards by 

 twenty feet, but a melon ground was cut off it at the eud 

 nearest the stable. Some of the boundary was hedged, some 

 walled, some oak palings, and a small portion rustic fence. 



!N'ow all this may be thought beside the mark, but it is a 

 general, if not universal failing among owners to cram in all 



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