Now, with regard to the former of these two considerations, I allow that a faithful imitation, even of a deformed original, is capable of affording great intellectual pleasure to the beholder, provided that imitation, like that displayed in painting and sculpture, be produced through dint of materials, or tools so different from those of which is composed the original imitated, as to evince in the imitator extraordinary ingenuity and powers; but the imitation of a natural landscape, through means of the very ingredients of all natural scenery; namely, air, earth, trees, and water, (and which imitation will in general offer greater truth in proportion as it is attained through greater neglect,) cannot possess that merit which consists in the overcoming of difficulties and the display of genius; unless, indeed, it be an imitation of such a species of wild scenery as is totally foreign to the genius of the locality in which it is produced; unless it consists in substituting mountains to plains, waterfalls to puddles, and precipices to flats; and in that case, on the contrary, the attempt at imitation will become so arduous as to threaten terminating in a total failure, by only offering, instead of a sublime and improved resemblance, a most paltry and mean caricature. Since, then, in a garden, the imitation of the less symmetric arrangements of rude nature can afford little or no peculiar gratification to the mind in their sole capacity as imitations, the question becomes restricted within a very narrow compass; and all that remains to be inquired into is, whether, in that garden, the exclusive admission of mere unsymmetric forms of simple nature, or their mixture with a certain proportion of the more symmetric forms of professed art, will give more intense and more varied pleasure to the eye? And, when thus stated, I should think the question would be nearly answered in the same way by every unprejudiced person. I should think it would be denied by none, that if, on the one hand, the most irregular habitation, still, through the very nature of its construction and purposes, must ever necessarily remain most obviously symmetric and formal; if not in its whole, at least in its various details, of doors, windows, steps, entablatures, etc., and if, on the other hand, as I take it, all beauty consists in that contrast, that variety, that distinctness of each of the different component parts of a whole, from the remaining parts, which renders each individually a relief to the remainder, combined with that harmony, that union of each of these different component parts of that whole with the remaining parts, which renders each a support to the remainder, and enables the eye and mind to glide over and compass the whole with rapidity and with ease, fewer striking features of beauty will be found in a garden, where, from the very threshold of the still ever symmetric mansion, one is launched in the most abrupt manner, into