HISTORICAL NOTICES. 
31 
grandly closing in with the tall blue summits of me distant 
Kaatskills. The smiling, gently varied lawn is studded 
with groups and masses of fine forest and ornamental 
trees, beneath which are walks leading in easy curves to 
rustic seats, and summer houses placed in secluded spots, 
or to openings affording most loveiy prospects. (See 
Frontispiece.) In various situations near the house and 
upon the lawn, sculptured vases of Maltese stone are also 
disposed in such a manner as to give a refined and classic 
air to the grounds. 
As a pendant to this graceful landscape, there is within 
the grounds scenery of an opposite character, equally wild 
and picturesque — a fine, bold stream, fringed with woody 
banks, and dashing over several rocky cascades, thirty or 
forty feet in height, and falling altogether a hundred feet 
in a distance of half a mile. There are also, within the 
grounds, a pretty gardener’s lodge, in the rural cottage 
style, and a new entrance lodge by the gate, in the 
bracketed mode ; in short, we can recall no place of 
moderate extent, where nature and tasteful art are both 
so harmoniously combined to express grace and elegance. 
Montgomery Place , the residence of Mrs. Edward 
Livingston, which is also situated on the Hudson, near 
Barrytown, deserves a more extended notice than our 
present limits allow, for it is, as a whole, nowhere sur- 
passed in America, in point of location, natural beauty, or 
the landscape gardening charms which it exhibits. 
It is one of ©ur oldest improved country seats, having 
been originally the residence of Gen. Montgomery, the hero 
of Quebec. On the death of his widow it passed 4 into the 
hands of her brother, Edward Livingston, Esq., the late 
minister to France, and up to the present moment hag 
