and, with the various artificial slopes and
levels of the high bank, bear perfect evidence how actively Art had been here
employed to decorate Nature.
    Few of these scenes are now left in perfection; for the fickleness of
fashion has accomplished in England the total change which devastation and
popular fury have produced in the French pleasure-grounds. For my part, I am
contented to subscribe to the opinion of the best qualified judge of our time,3
who thinks we have carried to an extreme our taste for simplicity, and that the
neighbourhood of a stately mansion requires some more ornate embellishments than
can be derived from the meagre accompaniments of grass and gravel. A highly
romantic situation may be degraded, perhaps, by an attempt at such artificial
ornaments; but, then, in by far the greater number of sites, the intervention of
more architectural decoration than is now in use, seems necessary to redeem the
naked tameness of a large house, placed by itself in the midst of a lawn, where
it looks as much unconnected with all around as if it had walked out of town
upon an airing.
    How the taste came to change so suddenly and absolutely is rather a singular
circumstance, unless we explain it on the same principle on which the three
friends of the Father in Molière's comedy recommend a cure for the melancholy of
his daughter - that he should furnish her apartment, namely, with paintings -
with tapestry - or with china, according to the different commodities in which
each of them was a dealer. - Tried by this scale, we may perhaps discover that,
of old, the architect laid out the garden and the pleasure-grounds in the
neighbourhood of the mansion, and, naturally enough, displayed his own art there
in statues and vases, and paved terraces and flights of steps, with ornamented
balustrades; while the gardener, subordinate in rank, endeavoured to make the
vegetable kingdom correspond to the prevailing taste, and cut his evergreens
into verdant walls, with towers and battlements, and his detached trees into a
resemblance of statuary. But the wheel has since revolved, so as to place the
landscape gardener, as he is called, almost upon a level with the architect; and
hence a liberal and somewhat violent use is made of spade and pick-axe, and a
conversion of the ostentatious labours of the architect into a ferme ornée, as
little different from the simplicity of Nature, as displayed in the surrounding
country, as the comforts of convenient and cleanly walks, imperiously demanded
in the vicinage of a gentleman's residence, can possibly admit.
    To return from this digression