298 



PARKS AND PLEASURE-GROUNDS. 



and the .ikelihood of his directions being mistaken, or 

 forgotten may be regarded as amounting to certainty. 



In connection with this part of the subject, we take 

 the liberty of remarking, that it is not advisable for 

 gentlemen who intend to consult a landscape-gardener 

 to engage in preparatory operations, for the purpose 

 of clearing the way for him. Such work is better left 

 to the artist himself, and more particularly when he 

 has to deal with old places. In the improvement of 

 existing park and pleasure-grounds, the operations 

 have, perhaps, as close an analogy to sculpture as to 

 painting. Give the improver a well-wooded country, 

 with a surface sufficiently diversified, and he will cut 

 out of it a park and pleasure-ground, just as a sculptor 

 will cut a group out of a block of marble. But what 

 would the sculptor say, were the stone-cutters in the 

 quarry to insist on reducing his block to what they 

 conceived might be an appropriate shape ? Equally 

 objectionable is preliminary interference with the pro- 

 per work of the landscape-gardener. We once met 

 with an afflictive case of this kind. A gentleman had 

 been induced to prepare for our advent, by thinning 

 out the trees and smoothing the ground in an old wood 

 on the drawing-room front of the house. He unfor- 

 tunately allowed the operations to proceed in his ab- 

 sence; and on his return home, which he had been 

 obliged to leave for some months, he found several 

 acres of grass, and, instead of the old wood, a few 

 ragged, misshapen trees, little better than bare poles, 

 stuck here and there over the surface. The reader 

 will readily conceive the horror of the proprietor when 

 he discovered that the leveling Goths had not con- 

 tented themselves with smoothing the ground, but had 



