DELIBERATE DESIGNING NECESSARY. 



221 



to lend his aid, and perhaps with an intelligible hint 

 that the sooner he is done the better, 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 execn- 

 tion, the more likely he is to leave everything else an 

 entire barren. A man may tlirust his preconceived fan- 

 cies 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 sug- 

 gestion to come into tree play^. Here an intelligent 



* " According to the common process, their time (that of im- 

 provers) is estimated at a certain number of guineas per day, and 

 the party consulting them is not unnaturally interested in getting 

 as much out of the professor within as httle 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 deter- 

 mine, unless he were to visit the grounds in different hghts and 

 at different seasons and various 'times of the day du.ring tlie 

 coOTse 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 

 httle or no time allowed him to judge what that alteration ought 

 to be. Hence men of taste and genius are reduced to act at 

 random ; hence an habitual disregard of the genius loci, and a 

 proportional degree of confidence in a set of general rules, influ- 

 encing their own practice, so that they do not receive from nature 

 the impression of Avhat a place ought to be, but impress on na- 

 ture at a venture the stamp, manner, or character of their own 

 practice, as a mechanic puts the same marks on aU the goods 

 which pass tlirough his hands." — Sir Walter Scott's Prose Works, 

 vol. xxi. p. 105. 



