up, the trees shall be cut down, the wilderness and all its goats
shall vanish like mist. Pagodas and Chinese bridges, gravel walks and
shrubberies, bowling-greens, canals, and clumps of larch, shall rise
upon its ruins. One age, sir, has brought to light the treasures of
ancient learning; a second has penetrated into the depths of
metaphysics; a third has brought to perfection the science of
astronomy; but it was reserved for the exclusive genius of the present
times, to invent the noble art of picturesque gardening, which has
given, as it were, a new tint to the complexion of nature, and a new
outline to the physiognomy of the universe!"

"Give me leave," said Sir Patrick O'Prism, "to take an exception to
that same. Your system of levelling, and trimming, and clipping, and
docking, and clumping, and polishing, and cropping, and shaving,
destroys all the beautiful intricacies of natural luxuriance, and all
the graduated harmonies of light and shade, melting into one another,
as you see them on that rock over yonder. I never saw one of your
improved places, as you call them, and which are nothing but big
bowling-greens, like sheets of green paper, with a parcel of round
clumps scattered over them, like so many spots of ink, flicked at
random out of a pen,[4.1] and a solitary animal here and there looking
as if it were lost, that I did not think it was for all the world like
Hounslow Heath, thinly sprinkled over with bushes and highwaymen."

"Sir," said Mr Milestone, "you will have the goodness to make a
distinction between the picturesque and the beautiful."

"Will I?" said Sir Patrick, "och! but I won't. For what is beautiful?
That what pleases the eye. And what pleases the eye? Tints variously
broken and blended. Now, tints variously broken and blended constitute