86 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE. 



eradicated in order to replant in formal rows ? And if in 

 travelling through the country he found everywhere a 

 repetition of the same thing, every village a miniature city, 

 differing from its neighbors only in size, or in greater or 

 less display of pretentious public or private buildings, 

 might he not justly feel the utter deficiency of an appre- 

 ciative sense of the truly beautiful in nature, and be 

 painfully impressed with the fact that a most important 

 element of popular education was entirely ignored ? 



That such is the impression made upon every man of 

 cultivated taste is an easily ascertained fact. Of course 

 the rule is not without exceptions, and moreover there are 

 very few communities in which more or less individuals 

 may not be found, who by precept and example are exert- 

 ing a constant and powerful influence in educating the 

 popular taste to a love of the really beautiful instead of 

 mere tawdry or finical displays. 



The apology always offered is the poverty of a new set- 

 tlement and the demand for all the means at their dispo- 

 sal to meet the expenses of absolute neceessity. 



But all the wind is taken out of that sail by the fact 

 that true taste would be far less expensive than the present 

 system, because it would leave undisturbed such natural 

 features as could be preserved without actual inconven- 

 ience, and thus save much of what is commonly the most 

 costly of the works of public improvement. The idea 

 that an artistic arrangement is necessarily costly, comes 

 from the almost universal misapprehension of the meaning 

 of the term, which to most minds conveys only the idea 

 of elaborate artificial decoration, when in reality the art 



