HISTORICAL NOTICES. 
23 
the passion for which pervades a people rich in ancient and 
modem sculptural works of art. Indeed many of the 
gardens on the continent are more striking from their 
numerous sculpturesque ornaments, interspersed with 
fountains and jets-d’eau, than from the beauty or rarity 
of their vegetation, or from their arrangement. 
In the United States, it is highly improbable that we 
shall ever witness such splendid examples of landscape 
gardens as those abroad, to which we have alluded. Here 
the rights of man are held to be equal ; and if there are 
no enormous parks, and no class of men whose wealth is 
hereditary, there is, at least, what is more gratifying to 
the feelings of the philanthropist, the almost entire absence 
of a very poor class in the country ; while we have, on 
the other hand, a large class of independent landholders, 
who are able to assemble around them, not only the useful 
and convenient, but the agreeable and beautiful, in country 
life. 
The number of individuals among us who possess wealth 
and refinement sufficient to enable them to enjoy the 
pleasures of a country life, and who desire in their private 
residences so much of the beauties of landscape gardening 
and rural embellishment as may be had without any 
enormous expenditure of means, is every day increasing. 
And although, until lately, a very meagrfe plan of laying 
out the grounds of a residence, was all that we could lay 
claim to, yet the taste for elegant rural improvements is 
advancing now so rapidly, that we have no hesitation in 
predicting that in half a century more, there will exist a 
greater number of beautiful villas and country seats of 
moderate extent, in the Atlantic States, than in any 
country in Europe, England alone excepted. With us, a 
