156 The Art of Landscape Gardening 



Among the trees is seen part of the colonnade thatjoins 

 the east wing to the body of the house : from the gen- 

 eral character of this scenery, we cannot but suppose this 

 to be a fragment of some ruined Grecian temple, and no 

 part of a modern inhabited palace. Hence it is evident 

 that the mind cannot associate the ideas of elegance 

 with neglect or perfect repair and neatness with ruin and 

 decay : such objects, therefore, however picturesque in 

 themselves, are incongruous and misplaced if near such 

 a palace as Attingham. 



Another mistake of the admirers of painters' land- 

 scape is the difference in the quantity of a natural and 

 an artificial composition : the finest pictures of Claude 

 (and here again 1 may refer to a picture at Atting- 

 ham) seldom consist of more than one fifth of that field 

 of vision which the eye can with ease behold, without 

 any motion of the head, viz. about 20 degrees out of 

 90 ; and we may further add that without moving the 

 body our field of vision is extended to 180 degrees. 



Now it is obvious that the picture of Claude, already 

 mentioned, which is between four and five feet long, 

 if it had been extended to 20 or 30 feet, would not 

 have been so pleasing a composition ; because, instead 

 of a picture, it would have resembled a panorama. This 

 I may further instance, in the view from the breakfast- 

 room, consisting of a distant range of mountains, by 

 far too long for any picture. Yet a small part of this 

 view might furnish a subject for the painter, by sup- 

 posing a tree to form the foreground of the landscape. 

 Are we then to plant such a tree, or a succession of 

 such trees, to divide the whole field of vision into sep- 

 arate landscapes ? and would not such an attempt at 

 improvement be like placing five or six pictures of 

 Claude in one long frame ? The absurdity of the idea 



