Retrospective Criticism. 485 



I have marked the erroneous and doubtful accentuation of No. X., but 

 withhold it until I learn your wishes. Sir, yours, &c. — T.B. Dec. 5. 1827. 



For these corrections we return our best thanks, and shall feel greatly 

 obliged by their being continued. In future, we hope to render them less 

 necessary. In our Hortus Britannicus we have, in almost every case, fol- 

 lowed Donn's Hortus Cantabrigiensis, and meant to have done so here ; 

 the above, therefore, are inadvertencies, which we hope to avoid in future. 

 — Cond. 



Beauty in Masses. — » Sir, An observation of yours in the description 

 of the grounds at Dropmore, with which you have recently favoured the 

 public, having struck me as something incongruous in the general manner 

 in which you have made it, I take the liberty, though neither author nor 

 botanist, of addressing you on the subject, in the hope of eliciting from you 

 at some future time some new lights upon it, or of rendering more bright, 

 or directing more wisely, those dim ones which I may have at present. 



You speak highly of the advantage of placing beauty in masses. A 

 general idea, and so placed as to make me think that you mean to speak 

 of every kind of beauty, and therefore, without diverging even from the 

 subject of gardening (if I understood it), I think, from the known effect of 

 beauty in other matters, I shall be able to give at least some reason for dis- 

 senting from you in this. But I must premise that, notwithstanding the 

 beauty of my subject, and the admiration which, as a true lover of beauty, 

 I must have for the curve and elliptic, all I have to say will nevertheless 

 be in parallels. I bespeak your patience ; in other words, I presume not to 

 be circuitous, and to begin a species of interrogative comparison with the 

 liberal arts. In poetry, which, I would ask, has the greater effect ? a single 

 fine thought, simile, or allusion, or a string or collection of them? Which, 

 in painting, are the more generally admired pictures, speaking of immediate 

 effect, those in which a mass of one tint in colour predominates, or those in 

 which there is a happy blending or mixing of colours ? And in music, are 

 we more affected by a particular note long held, or by undulating swells or 

 cadences ? To speak on a subject still more generally understood and 

 felt, what is the effect of beauty in those locomotive flowers of creation, 

 women ? Does the presence of one beautiful woman among a crowd of 

 others who are not so, create more or less effect than when beautiful 

 women are seen more numerously? Or, to speak more directly still, is 

 feminine beauty more prized, admired, or striking in Greece, where it is 

 seen en masse, as one may say, or in France, where truth obliges us to 

 confess that it is comparatively rare ? You will say, perhaps, that masses of 

 flowers of one sort in a garden are in direct imitation of nature herself, who 

 in a wild state scatters profusely en masse It may be so ; but I never 

 knew that it was in any particular form, segment, or circle. The little 

 hillocks of wild thyme that scent the air so agreeably for the traveller, the 

 modest forget-me-not that borders the rivulets, and the scented violet 

 that creeps along the shade, may indeed be seen in profusion where they 

 are found ; but they are nevertheless so disposed by " nature's sweet and 

 cunning hand," as to set at nought the proportions of square or round, 

 oblong°or semicircular. If art means therefore to trammel her by line and 

 rule, and to take off her beautiful wildness and whimsicality, she ought at 

 least to supply her with elegance, which is scarcely found en masse. On 

 this very account how exceedingly beautiful and pleasing was the manner 

 in which the chrysanthemums were disposed in the Horticultural Society's 

 garden last season. Had these fanciful children of the garden been arranged 

 in masses, according to their tints and shades, how formal and unnatural 

 would the effect have been, at least according to my opinion. The relation 

 between art and nature has always appeared to me of the same kind as 

 that between judgment and imagination ; the latter, uncorrected by the 



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