399 



natural river look like an artificial one ; I hope 

 Mr. Repton will have a nobler ambition — that 

 of having his pieces of water mistaken for 

 natural lakes and rivers. 



P. 318, 1.9- Although I have allowed Mr. Brown the 

 negative merit of having left the wooded bank 

 at Blenheim as he found it, yet I cannot allow 

 that he or any of his school could ever have 

 felt or distinguished the peculiar beauties of 

 its unimproved state. A professed improver is 

 in many respects like a professed picture -cleaner; 

 the one is always occupied with grounds, and 

 the other with pictures ; but the eyes and taste 

 of both are in general so vitiated by their prac- 

 tice, that they see nothing in either but subjects 

 for smoothing and polishing ; and they work on, 

 till they have skinned and flayed every thing they 

 meddle with. Those characteristic, and spirited 

 roughnesses, together with that patina, the varnish 

 of time, which time only can give, (and which in 

 pictures may sometimes hide crudities which escape 

 even the last glazing of the painter) immediately 

 disappear ; and pictures and places are scoured as 

 bright as Scriblerus's shield, and with as little 

 remorse on the part of the scourers. 



P.320, 1.5. As I have dwelt very much on the bad 

 effect of distinct edges, it may be right to 

 observe, that whenever a separation of the ge- 

 neral covering of the ground, whether grass. 



