A lake may be artificial; but it will only appear so if its location is artificial; and, therefore, in spite of the fact that there are countless mountain tarns in Scotland and Wales, it is safest for the lake to be made on the lowest part of your ground. I dare say that a scientific man without a conscience could, by an arrangement of forced draught apparatus, cause an artificial river to flow uphill instead of down; but though such a stream would be quite a pleasing incident of one of the soirees of the Royal Society at Burlington House, I am certain that it would look more curious than natural if carried out in an English garden ground. The artificial canals of the Dutch gardens and of those English gardens which were made to remind William III. of his native land, will look natural in proportion to their artificiality. This is not so hard a saying as it may seem; I mean to say that if the artificial canal apes a natural river, it will look unnatural. If it aims at being nothing but a Dutch canal, it will be a very interesting part of a garden--a Dutch garden--plan, and as such it will seem in the right and natural place. If a thing occupies a natural place--the place where you expect to find it--it must be criticised from the standpoint of its environment, so to speak, and not on the basis of the canons that have a general application. And to my mind the difference between what is right and what is wrong in a garden is not the difference between what is the fashion and what is not the fashion; but between the appropriate and the inappropriate. A rectangular canal is quite right in a copy of the Dutch garden; but it would be quite wrong within sight of the cascades of the Villa d'Este or any other Italian garden. Topiary work is quite right in a garden that is meant frankly to be a copy of one of the clipped shrubberies of the seventeenth and of the eighteenth century that preceded landscape treatment, but it is utterly out of place in a garden where flowers grow according to their own sweet will, as in a rosery or a herbaceous border. A large number of people dislike what Mr. Robinson calls “Vegetable Sculpture,” and would not allow any example to have a place on their property; but although I think I might trust myself to resist every temptation to admit such an element into a garden of mine, I should not hesitate to make a feature of it if I wanted to be constantly reminded of a certain period of history. It would be as unjust to blame me on this account as it would be to blame Mr. Hugh Thomson for introducing topiary into one of his exquisite illustrations to Sir Roger de Coverley. I would, I know, take great pleasure in sitting for hours among the peacocks and bears and cocked hats of the topiary sculptor, because I should feel myself in the company of Sir Roger and Will Wimble, and I consider that they would be very good company indeed; but I admit that I should prefer that that particular garden was on some one else's property.