A piece of ground laid out with a studied avoidance of all order, all balance, all definite lines, and the result a hopeless disagreement between the house and its surroundings. This very effect can be seen in the efforts of the landscape gardener, and in old country houses, such as Barrington Court, near Langport, where the gardens have not been kept up. Here, instead of taking one of the many good examples in Britain, they take poor, beautiful old Barrington, now an ill-kept farmhouse, with manure piled against the walls and the ceiling of the dining-room propped up with a Fir pole! The foolish proposition here laid down, that, because a garden is picturesque there must necessarily be a "_studied avoidance of all order, all balance, all definite lines_," is disproved by hundreds of gardens in England. Why did not the authors take Miss Alice de Rothschild's garden at Eythorpe, or any beautiful and picturesque English garden, to compare with their results in stone and clipped and aligned trees? [Illustration: _Unclipped trees at the Little Trianon. (Compare with cut on p. 52.)_] "ALL OUR PATHS" ARE CROOKED! For instance, because Nature is assumed never to show straight lines, all paths are to be made crooked; because in a virgin forest there are no paths at all, let us in our acre and a half of garden make as little of the paths as possible. Deception is a primary object of the landscape gardener. (_The Formal Garden._) This, too, in the face of the facts of the case, of proof ready for the authors, in gardens in every country, from Prospect Park at Brooklyn to the English park at Munich. The fact that the Phoenix Park at Dublin is laid out in a fine, picturesque way does not forbid a great straight road through it--a road finer than in any strait-laced park in France. The late Robert Marnock was the best landscape gardener I have known, and I never saw one of his many gardens where he did not make an ample straight walk where an ample straight walk was required--as, indeed, many may remember is the case in the Botanic Gardens in the Regent's Park, laid out by him. Again, Nature is said to prefer a curved line to a straight, and it is thence inferred that all the lines in a garden, and especially paths, should be curved. The utter contempt for design of the landscape gardener is shown most conspicuously in his treatment of paths. He lays them about at random, and keeps them so narrow that they look like threads, and there is barely room to walk abreast. The opposite of this is indeed the truth, for many gardens and parks laid out with some regard to landscape beauty are partly spoiled by the size and number of the walks, as in the gardens around Paris--the Parc Monceau and Buttes Chaumont, for instance. The slightest knowledge of gardens would show that walks like threads are no necessary part of landscape gardening! [Illustration: _Westonbirt_]