HAZARD OF PREPARATORY OPERATIONS. 227 



gentlemen who intend to consult a landscape-gardener^ 

 to engage in preparatory operations for tlie purpose of 

 clearing tlie way for liim. 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 

 parks and pleasure-grounds, the operations have, perhaps, 

 as close an analogy to sculpture as to painting. Give 

 the improver a well wooded country, yvith. a surface sufS- 

 ciently diversified, and he will cut out of it a park and 

 pleasm^e-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 approxi- 

 mate shape? Equally objectionable is preliminary in- 

 terference with the proper work of the landscape gar- 

 dener. 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 unfortunately allowed the operations to proceed in 

 his absence, 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, mis- 

 shapen trees, little better than bare poles, stuck here 

 and there over the surface. The reader will readily con- 

 ceive the horror of the proprietor when he discovered 

 that the levelling Groths had not contented themselves 

 with smoothing the gromid, but had also swept away 

 trees which it would take a century to replace. It was 

 with deep sympathy that we smn'^eyed the scene of deso- 

 lation, mingled with regret, that for the preservation of 

 many elements of beauty which had, without doubt, 

 existed, we had arrived nine months too late. 



