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both you and Mr. Knight are in the habit of admiring fine pictures, and both live amidst 

 bold and picturesque scenery. This may have rendered you insensible to the beauty of 

 those milder scenes which have charms for common observers. I will not arraign your 

 taste, nor call it vitiated ; but your palate certainly requires a degree of irritation rarely 

 to be expected in garden scenery; and I trust the good sense and good taste of this 

 country will never be led to despise the comfort of a gravel walk, the delicious fragrance 

 of a shrubbery, the soul's delight of a wide-extended prospect, or a view down a steep hill, 

 because they are all subjects incapable of being painted." 



I may further quote the close of a letter to Mr. Repton, from William 

 Windham, Esq., of Fellbrig, Norfolk, who, after shewing the unphilosophical 

 system which Mr. Knight and Sir Uvedale Price seem to have set up. 

 observes : — 



" Places are not to be laid out with a view to their appearance in a picture, but to 

 their uses, and the enjoyment of them in real life ; and their conformity to those purposes 

 is that which constitutes their beauty. With this view gravel walks and neat mown 

 lawns, and in some situations straight alleys, fountains, terraces — and, for aught I know, 

 parterres and cut hedges, — are in perfect good taste, and infinitely more conformable to 

 the principles which form the bases of our pleasure in these instances, than the docks 

 and thistles, and litter and disorder, that may make a much better figure in a picture." 



No one admires nature more than I do, or has a more pleasurable 

 interest in the various forms which she is ever presenting to mankind. My 

 views are fully borne out by the language of the poet : — 



" Nature in every form is lovely still. 

 I can admire to ecstacy, although 

 I be not bower 'd in a rustling grove. 

 Tracing through flowery tufts some twinkling rill ; 

 Or, perch'd upon a green and sunny hill, 

 Gazing upon the sylvanry below, 

 And hearkening to the warbling beaks above. 

 To me the wilderness of thorns and brambles, 

 Beneath whose weeds the muddy runnel scrambles, — 

 The bald, burnt moor, — the marsh's sedgy shallows, 

 Where docks, bulrushes, waterflags, and mallows 

 Choke the rank waste, alike can yield delight. 

 A blade of silver hair-grass, nodding slowly 

 In the soft wind ; — the thistle's purple crown, 

 The ferns, the rushes tall, and mosses lowly, 

 A thorn, a weed, an insect, or a stone, 

 Can thrill me with sensations exquisite — 

 For all are exquisite, and every part 

 Points to the Mighty Hand that fashioned it." 

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