368 
LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
been executed., it may have produced baldness rather than beauty; and 
however right such a design might be for the embellishment of a place 
like Fairfax Hall, it would be improper, and perfectly inconsistent 
with the character and architecture of such a place as ——— Abbey; 
for, supposing an improver of this stamp were employed to impress his 
ideas of beauty on the abbey grounds, it is probable he 'would begin 
by demolishing the ancient entrance-gate, lodge, and lofty wall, which 
he would call repulsive, to be replaced by a light palisade gate between 
two elegant lodges built of hewn stone, flanked by an iron palisade 
fence. He would next thin the thick wood through which the 
approach passes, clearing away all the undergrowths, in order to have 
a carpet of turf spread out on each side. This done, he would next 
expose the tunnelled stream, widen its channel, and regularly slope its 
banks, to be covered by the smoothest turf; and over the stream he 
would throw an elegant white-painted bridge, as a beacon to the front 
door of the abbey, and which he would make ostensibly inviting by 
clearing away every intervening obstruction of trees or shrubs which 
might impede a full display of it. 
He would be shocked to see the abrupt bank on the east side of the 
house, and the irregular course of the stream down the vale. The first 
he w r ould slope regularly from the base of the building to the water’s 
edge ; the latter he would confine in an accurately excavated serpentin¬ 
ing channel, visible perhaps its whole length, and only diversified by 
patches of young trees, in threes and Jives , on the points of the bends 
of the river’s course. 
He -would next complain of the suffocating closeness of the w T oods on 
each side of the valley. These he would dismember by cutting wide 
openings or glades, to reduce the impenetrable screen of wood into 
ranks of clumps, clearing all rough undergrow r tks which may have 
sprung up in the course of time beneath or round the skirts of the old 
wood. It is probable, also, that this Brownist would condemn some of 
the venerable trees standing near the mansion, as being too heavy, 
and making the building much less conspicuous than he would wish 
it to be. 
The improver's idea, in the execution of all these different proceed¬ 
ings and alterations, is to give the place an air of lightness and gaiety ; 
and by the trim neatness into which he moulds every feature, to show 
that the hand of art and refined taste has been employed upon it. He 
would feel it his business to change the lugubrious aspect of the place, 
by banishing every appearance of natural accident, or roughness indica¬ 
tive of neglect. 
Now this is a case demonstrative of the impropriety of attempting to 
