12 



INTRODUCTION. 



may be said to depend on the use which he makes of foreign 

 trees and shrubs. Our reasons for this are grounded on the 

 principle that all art, to be acknowledged as such, must be 

 avowed. This is the case in the fine arts ; there is no attempt 

 to conceal art in music, poetry, painting, or sculpture : none in 

 architecture; and none in the geometrical style of landscape- 

 gardening. Why should there be an attempt to conceal art in 

 modern landscape-gardening? Because, we shall be told, it is 

 an art which imitates nature. But, does not landscape-painting 

 also imitate nature ; and yet, in it, the work produced is ac- 

 knowledged t6 be one of art ? Before this point is settled, it is 

 necessary to recur to what is meant by the imitation of nature, 

 and to reflect on the difference between repetition and imitation. 

 In what are called the imitative arts, it will be found that the 

 imitation is always made in such a manner as to produce a totally 

 distinct work from the thing imitated ; and never, on any ac- 

 count, so like as to be mistaken for it. In landscape-painting, 

 scenery is represented by colours on a flat surface ; in sculpture, 

 forms, which in nature are coloured, are represented in colour- 

 less stone. The intention of the artist, in both cases, is not to 

 produce a copy which shall be mistaken for the original, but 

 rather to show the original through the medium of a particular 

 description of art; to reflect nature as in a glass. Now, to 

 render landscape-gardening a fine art, some analogous process 

 must be adopted by the landscape-gardener. In the geometrical 

 style, he has succeeded perfectly, by arranging grounds and 

 trees in artificial surfaces, forms, and lines, so different from 

 nature as to be recognised at once as works of art. A residence 

 thus laid out is clearly distinguished from the woody scenery of 

 the surrounding country ; and is satisfactory, because it displays 

 the working of the human mind, and confers distinction on the 

 owner as a man of wealth and taste. A residence laid out in 

 the modern style, with the surface of the ground disposed in 

 imitation of the undulations of nature, and the trees scattered 

 over it in groups and masses, neither in straight lines, nor cut 

 into artificial shapes, might be mistaken for nature, were not 

 the trees planted chiefly of foreign kinds not to be met with in 

 the natural or general scenery of the country. Every thing in 

 modern landscape-gardening, therefore, depends on the use of 

 foreign trees and shrubs ; and, when it is once properly under- 

 stood that no residence in the modern style can have a claim to 

 be considered as laid out in good taste, in which all the trees 

 and shrubs employed are not either foreign ones, or improved 

 varieties of indigenous ones, the grounds of every country seat, 

 from the cottage to the mansion, will become an arboretum, dif- 

 fering only in the number of species which it contains. 



Though a taste for trees has existed from the earliest ages, 

 that taste, in this country at least, may still be considered in its 



