Roads and Paths 
ence between a bad approach and a good 
one. 
It is folly, every one will confess, to force 
a landscape-gardener to lay out a straight 
road where a curved one would look better, 
or a curved road where a direct one would 
be more sensible and therefore more beauti- 
ful ; to compel him to run a road over a 
hillock which it might encircle, or down 
into a hollow and up again when it might 
pass to one side ; to give him no convenient 
access to the high road except at a point 
where turning-in is awkward ; to forbid him 
to take in a good point of view which 
might easily be shown from the drive, or to 
show unpleasing objects which might be con- 
cealed. And yet it would be easy to point 
to many American places where just such 
necessities have been forced upon the land- 
scape-gardener by an error in the placing of 
the house, or where, to avoid them, he is 
compelled to spend a large amount of mon- 
ey, and perhaps to injure the general effect 
of the place, in altering the configuration 
of the ground. When the position of the 
principal entrance relative to the high road 
95 
