40 Landscape Gardening 



in very rare and peculiar instances, be brought into conjunc- 

 tion. 



9. Unsuitable ornaments are things which many persons 

 who have only a glimmering of the requirements of art have 

 a great propensity for placing about gardens. These may 

 be of the nature of artificial basins of water, ponds, figures, 

 bridges, flag-poles, prospect-towers, cannon, groups of stones, 

 spar, or roots, with objects of a similar nature, which may or 

 may not be fitting ornaments for a garden in themselves, but 

 which may be so inappropriately disposed, or so entirely 

 unallied to the prevailing characteristics of a particular spot, 

 as to be wholly inadmissible. In some few cases it may 

 happen that the vulgarity or the ugliness of an individual 

 object offends the eye of taste, but a much more common 

 cause for complaint exists in the passion for scraping together 

 all sorts of good or indifferent things without adequate regard 

 being paid to their affinity to each other, or their suitableness 

 for the place' in which they are deposited. 



ID. Cheap Surprises. — The making arrangements in the 

 plan of a place for occasioning to visitors one or more little 

 surprises as they are passing round the garden, is extremely 

 unsatisfactory at best. It is an appeal to the lowest species 

 of admiration, and all the pleasure it may occasion is but 

 momentary, and can never be renewed to the same individual. 

 When on a small scale, too, the machinery by which the effect 

 is produced will be always sadly apparent. Solid merits and 

 substantial beauties are much to be preferred, for the pleasure 

 to be derived from them never ceases and does not satiate. 



II. Eccentricities. — From a similar cause, all manner of 

 eccentricities in a garden will, if they have nothing better to 

 boast of, never obtain lasting admiration and, as in personal 

 character, are more generally the evidences of a feeble mind 

 than of the possession of genius. It is far safer and more 



