BEAUTIES AND PRINCIPLES OF THE ART. 
55 
resque schools of the art.* We have already suggested that 
almost all our country places have, naturally, one or the 
other of these characters ; and the unity and harmony — in 
short, the whole beauty and success of improvements, will 
depend on our feeling and understanding those character- 
istics before we commence exercising our taste. The fore- 
going hints on expression in wild landscape, will perhaps 
assist our readers in reading nature’s physiognomy. Let 
us now examine, a little, the character of the two schools 
founded on these expressions. 
The graceful school of Landscape Gardening, (Fig. 
12,) aims at the production of outlines whose curves are 
expressive of grace, surfaces of softness, and growth of 
richness and luxuriance. In the shape of the ground, it 
is evinced by easy undulations, melting gradually into each 
other. In the form of trees, by smooth stems, full, round 
or symmetrical heads of foliage, and luxuriant branches, 
* Taking Landscape Gardening, as we do in this country, on new starting ground, 
we consider ourselves fairly at liberty to define, and clear up, the confused and 
cloudy views of the end or aim of imitation, pervading most European authors 
on this subject. Price, whose work on the Picturesque (see late edition of 
Sir T. Lauder,) is most full and complete, we consider the master, and able 
exponent of the Picturesque school. Repton, who advocates in his works a 
more polished and cultivated style, (see Loudon’s edition of Repton,) we hold to 
be the first authority in the Graceful School. Mr. Loudon’s Gardenesque style, 
is but another word for what we term the Graceful school ; except that we con- 
sider the latter exemplified in all flowing, luxuriantly developed forms ; while 
Mr. Loudon, who prefers mere artistical beauty to that of expression, properly limits 
the gardenesque to artificial planting only. The distinction between th e picturesque, 
and the beautiful , is perhaps open to some difference of opinion, and all Land- 
scape Gardening aims at the production of the beautiful. But in the graceful out- 
lines of highly cultivated forms of trees, and beautiful curves of surface and walks, 
in highly polished scenes, lies so different a kind of beauty from that of the irregu- 
lar ground, trees, etc., of picturesque landscape, that we conceive the two terms 
will be found, at least for the moderate scale of the art with us, at once precise 
and significant. 
