LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
165 
except in those coppices, condemned to keep a beaten or prescribed 
tract, but, with all the freedom of an inhabitant of the air, you can turn 
wherever fancy leads, or to whatever object may attract your attention. 
Should you wish to look out upon the surrounding country, you have 
only to gain some little knoll or eminence which surmounts the park 
pales. If the heat of the sun be oppressive, you may thread your way 
through the open groves, or wind your course along the shady side of 
the open glades. Here is no continuous circumscribing belt to confine 
and drag along the listless perambulator, impatient of such control; 
no obtrusive barrier, or menacing boundary to check your steps. In 
short, the ever-varying combinations of woods and lawn are so pleasingly 
disposed that you are instinctively, as it were, led from scene to scene, 
with increasing interest, to the point whence you set out. 
This style of enriching and embellishing the outskirts of a park is 
infinitely better than that of surrounding every one with a meagre 
strip of plantation, called a belt by Brown and his imitators. This 
indispensable feature of the Brownian style of improving a park by 
planting, had three very obvious faults ; it was always too long, and 
too narrow, and in general, being planted with an intermixture of the 
same kind of trees, had always a tedious and uninteresting effect, 
whether seen from within or without. The belt appears to have been 
adopted at first as a means of marking, more ostensibly, the extent or 
boundary of the park, and as a sign of the appropriation of the land it 
circumscribed to the more immediate use of the proprietor. The idea 
of carrying a ride through it was very natural, because it was not only 
having a ride of the greatest possible length within the park, but also 
allowed the owner an opportunity of observing at pleasure the progress 
made by his young trees. 
When belts were young, they were much less an eyesore than they 
became after fifteen or twenty years’ growth : the trees then began to 
get naked at bottom, and the sky being seen through, among the naked 
boles, declared at once their destitution of two of the principal beauties 
of a wood, namely, depth and massiveness . And as the belt very 
frequently occupied the highest ground, or horizon, they became 
exceedingly ugly, and, of course, were condemned by every eye of 
taste. 
This, at one time very fashionable feature, together with its defects, 
has been studiously avoided in planting the park of which I am writing. 
The real boundary, or park-paling, is never visible from any command¬ 
ing station; and is generally placed on lower ground than the surface of 
the park immediately within. This gives a freedom to the eve in 
riding round the verge of the park ; and, as the plantations are 
