292 



PARKS AND PLEASURE-GROUNDS. 



be allowed time and opportunity to exercise them. If 

 he is called but once to lend his aid, and perhaps with 

 an intelligible hint that the sooner he is done the bet- 

 ter, he may proceed rapidly to work, and in the brief 

 period conceded to him may do wonders; but the 

 more quickly and clearly he conceives the plan of the 

 one grand view, if there be but one, and the more 

 perfectly he carries it into execution, the more likely 

 he is to leave every thing else an entire barren. A 

 man may thrust his preconceived fancies on a place 

 as fast as he can stake them out ; but if the treatment 

 is to be adjusted to the ground, and if harmony and 

 variety of effect are desired, as they always ought to 

 be, time should be given for the laws of suggestion to 

 come into free play.* ■ Here an intelligent and tasteful 

 proprietor may render efficient aid, and of that aid a 

 sensible artist will always be glad to avail himself. 

 Even the expression of a feeling of want, though what 

 is wanted is not distinctly perceived, may direct the 

 attention of the designer, occupied with other things, 



* " According to the common process, then- time (that of improvers) is estimated at 

 a certain number of guineas per day, and the party consulting them is not unnatu- 

 rally interested in getting as much out of the professor within as little time as can 

 possibly be achieved. The landscape-gardener is therefore trotted over the grounds 

 two, three, or four times, and called upon to decide upon points which a proprietor 

 himself would hesitate to determine, unless he were to visit the grounds in different 

 lights and at different seasons and various times of the day during the course of a 

 year. This leads to a degree of precipitation on the part of the artist, who knows his 

 remuneration will be grudged unless he makes some striking and notable alteration, 

 yet has little or no time allowed him to judge what that alteration ought to be. 

 Hence men of taste and genius are induced to act at random; hence an habitual disre- 

 gard of the genius loci, and a proportional degree of confidence in a set of general 

 rules infiueucing their own practice, so that they do not receive from nature the 

 impression of what a place ought to be, but impress on nature at a venture the stamp, 

 manner, or character of their own practice, as a mechanic puts the same marks on all 

 the goods which pass through his hands."— Sir (■Falter Scott's Prose (Forks, vol. xxi. 

 p. 105. 



