354 Select Suburban Residences. 



require to be planted, in order to form, add to, or connect, 

 masses of wood ; and, in others, a coppice might require to be 

 thrown into pasture, and added to the park. But nature or ac- 

 cident had every where furnished so many trees in groups, that 

 it became altogether unnecessary to plant ; and hence there was 

 no necessity for forming those heavy clumps by which so many 

 places in every part of the country are disfigured. Another 

 advantage of Redleaf is, that there is no marked boundary to 

 the property ; the mixture of wood, pasture, corn field, hill, and 

 dale, being so much alike in general feature, in every part of 

 the country, that it is utterly impossible for a stranger to tell 

 where any man's estate begins or ends. Hence, there was no 

 temptation to perpetrate that deformity which so often accom- 

 panies the clump, viz. the belt ; a most unsocial plantation in a 

 moral point of view, as shutting out all one's neighbours, whether 

 poor or rich, and one which, as it regards pictorial beauty, gene- 

 rally destroys all harmonious connexion of the residence with 

 the surrounding country. Mr. Wells's operations on the park 

 scenery of Redleaf were therefore comparatively few, and not 

 such as in any degree tended to alter the character of the place. 

 He widened the river in one situation, and altered its direction 

 in another, in order that it might be better seen from the 

 windows of the house ; he removed hedgerows, and laid down 

 arable lands in pasture, so as to give extent and unity to the 

 park or lawn ; he added to or diminished the masses of wood, 

 for the same purpose ; and he formed a walk, so as to enable a 

 stranger to make a general circuit of the place. These were 

 the great features of improvement ; and they have been executed 

 with so much success, that a stranger, when he arrives at the 

 house, and looks at the views from its windows, is so struck with 

 the beauty and natural appearance of the scenery, that he can- 

 - not conceive that anything more is wanting to render the place 

 perfect of its kind. But the most beautiful scenery in the world, 

 whether the work of nature alone, or the result of nature aided 

 by art, will soon cease to please, unless it bears marks of its 

 appropriation to man, or can raise up associations of that 

 kind. Hence, the tourist, who admires natural scenery in 

 travelling through a beautiful country, endeavours to make it 

 his own, and to let others know that he has done so, either 

 by describing it in words which he can read to his friends, 

 or which he can print, and thus publish to the world (thereby 

 showing that he has as fully enjoyed the beauties of the 

 scenery as if it were his own) ; or he commits the scenery to 

 paper by a sketch, by which he seems also to appropriate 

 it to himself. The purchaser of a portion of the finest 

 scenery in the world never rests satisfied until he has done 

 something to it ; and it is not enough to do something, however 

 great a change that something may have produced, unless it be 



