434< Recollections of a Gardening Tour. 



views extending into the interior to where the distant hills 

 belonging to the estate are crowned with thriving plantations, 

 and by views across the river to the village of New Lanark. 

 Here are the extensive cotton-mills where the celebrated Robert 

 Owen first tried his philanthropic experiments. We scarcely 

 know any thing finer, in the way of appropriated scenery, than 

 the effect of the plantations about New Lanark, and thence 

 to Bonnington, as seen from the approach to Corehouse, and 

 the grounds about the house ; and the appearance of the grounds 

 and woods of Corehouse is doubtless equally effective, as seen 

 from the opposite side of the river. 



The house is in the old English domestic manner of Mr. 

 Blore; simple, grand, and with an elevated terrace on three sides. 

 The interior contains apartments, large, lofty, and well-arranged, 

 opening into a spacious hall. There is none of that confused 

 appearance sometimes found in modern Gothic houses, which 

 are often crowded with turrets, bell-towers, and chimney-tops, 

 without ; and traversed by narrow passages, and over-done 

 with Gothic cornices and other Gothic ornaments, within. Mr. 

 Blore has the happy art of giving a certain elegance of pro- 

 portion to the different parts of his buildings, in consequence of 

 which there are plain spaces, giving by contrast its full effect 

 to every moulding and ornament. Take, for example, a stack 

 of chimneys. When the mouldings at the base, and on the 

 top or capital, are brought too close together by the shortness 

 of the intermediate shaft, the effect is crowded, lumpish, and, in 

 every point of view, the reverse of elegant: but lengthen the 

 shaft to a certain extent, determinable by the feeling dictated 

 by an artistic eye, and elegance is at once produced; for 

 elegance is the effect of proportions more slender than what are 

 usual, executed in a material which conveys the idea of as 

 much strength as is contained in a much larger mass, or, at all 

 events, of amply sufficient strength. 



The rocky banks of the Clyde, and the dells, dingles, and 

 rocky steep-sided chasms containing the tributary rills which we 

 have mentioned, being all more or less clothed with natural wood, 

 and, consequently, all eminently picturesque and varied, what 

 can the proprietor of such a place as Corehouse have to do, in 

 the way of forming or improving ornamental scenery, seeing 

 that nature has done so much ? Is he to content himself with 

 building a house, laying out roads and walks, forming a kitchen- 

 garden and a flower-garden, and cultivating a farm? There 

 are, probably, some persons who would be satisfied with doing 

 these things, but there are not many. The most beautiful scenes 

 in nature do not give full satisfaction to the mind, unless we can, 

 in some way or other, associate them with self. If we can do 

 nothing else, we can point out their defects or beauties to a 



