ON ART IN A GARDEN. 37 



Now, it is not everything in Nature that can, or 

 that may be, artificially expressed in a garden ; nor 

 are the things that it is permissible to use, of equal 

 application everywhere. It were a palpable mistake, 

 an artistic crime, so to speak, to follow the wild 

 flights of Salvator Rosa and Caspar Poussin, and 

 with them to attempt a little amateur creation in the 

 way of rent rocks, tumbled hillsides, and ruins that 

 suggest a recent geological catastrophe, or antique 

 monsters, or that imply by the scenery that we are 

 living in the days of wattled abodes and savages 

 with flint hatchets. Much, of course, may be done 

 in this line in these days as in the past, if only one 

 have sufficient audacity and a volcanic mind ; yet, 

 when it is done, both the value and the Tightness of 

 the art of the thing is questionable. " Canst thou 

 catch Leviathan with a hook ? " The primaeval throes, 

 the grand stupendous imagery of Nature should be 

 held in more reverence. It were almost as fit to 

 harness a polar bear to the gardener's mowing- 

 machine as seek to appropriate the eerie phenomena 

 of Nature in her untamed moods for the ornamental 

 purposes of a garden. And as to the result of such 

 work, the ass draped in the lion's skin, roaring 

 horribly, with peaked snout and awkward shanks 

 visible all the while, is not more ridiculous than the 

 thinly- veiled savagery of an Italian garden of the 

 seventeenth century. 



Here, then, I think we have some guidance as to 

 the principles which should regulate the choice of 

 the "properties" that are fit for the scenic show of 



