310 



peculiar materials. The materials of landscape gardening 

 are every-day objects, such as trees, and ground, and water, 

 with which every one is conversant, and on which, therefore, 

 every one can certainly operate with effect. At all events, 

 they add, we have only " to follow nature," and, by conse- 

 quence, " to please ourselves." Now without entering into 

 the difficulties of following nature, or of operating with her 

 materials, which are neither few nor small, I would merely 

 observe to these reasoners, that the facihty with which they 

 can " please themselves," is but an indifferent proof of the 

 possession of either skill or taste. Persons of the best taste, 

 (that is, of the truest discernment of beauty and deformity 

 in the fine arts) are always the least easily pleased, and 

 least of all with their own efforts. Beauty, wherever it 

 e5:ists, they readily discern ; but they feel and acknowledge 

 their inabihty to produce it. Persons on the other hand, of 

 little taste are pleased with any thing, and every thing. To 

 them change, merely as such, is highly gratifying ; so that 

 they never fail to be pleased with their own attempts at ex- 

 cellence. 



The general error even of superior men, who become 

 their own landscape gardeners, is, that they mistake taste for 

 skill ; or, conscious that they possess the former, they con- 

 ceive that the latter is superfluous. Hence, when they come 

 to work with materials so unmanageable as those of nature, 

 they seldom succeed in pleasing themselves, and nine times 

 in ten, they fail in pleasing others. Nevertheless it is unde- 

 niable that there may be, and are country gentlemen, who 

 are quite adequate to the laying-out of their own places, 

 without assistance from the landscape gardener, in the same 

 way that there are others, who can construct their own 

 houses without the assistance of the architect. But it is 

 likewise unfortunately true, that whenever we meet with a 

 bad hon«e, or an ill laid-out place, it is, generally speaking, 

 the n'orJc of ihe nirner. Foxicv. the beautiful residence of 



