313 



I am persuaded that a very great im- 

 provement might be made in the banks of 

 artificial water merely by a different mode 

 of practice, without expecting from every 

 professor the eye, or the invention of a 

 Poussin. Mr. Brown and his followers have 

 indeed shewn very little invention, if it even 

 deserve that name, and of that little they 

 have been great ceconomists ; with them, 

 walks, roads, brooks, rivers are, as it were, 

 convertible terms : dry one of their rivers, 

 it is a large walk or road ; flood a walk or 

 a road, it is a brook or a river, and the 

 accompaniments, like the drone of a bag- 

 pipe, always remain the same. They do 

 not indeed, always dam up a brook ; it 

 sometimes, though rarelv, is allowed its 

 liberty ; but like animals that are suffered 

 by the owner to run loose, it is marked as 

 private property, by being mutilated*. If 

 instead of having their banks regularly 



* No operation in what is called improvement has such 

 an appearance of barbarity, as that of destroying the mo- 

 dest retired character of a broofc. I remember some 

 burlesque lines on the treatment of Regulus by the Car- 



