As I have already alluded to the improvement that will be effected by introducing a shrubbery to harmonise the intended flower-garden with the trees in the park, you will probably wish to know if any thing of the kind will be required on the back-front of the house; but in that case there will be less difficulty, as the terrace affords an admirable medium for uniting the architectural stiffness of a mansion with the beautiful wildness and grace of nature. There is always a degree of incongruity in passing abruptly from the stiff symmetrical forms of a building, to the unsymmetric, though graceful, forms of a tree left in a state of nature; and it was no doubt a feeling of this kind which induced our ancestors to surround their houses with formal architectural gardens and trees clipped into stiff and regular forms. In more modern times something of the same kind was done, by always adding to the house verandas, porticos, and terraces, which formed a connecting link between the building and its grounds. After a time these also were laid aside; and about the beginning of the last century, when Brown and his followers would admit nothing but what they called nature in garden scenery, the park was allowed to come close up to the windows of the house, and, as a writer in the _Gardener's Magazine_ observes, the inhabitants of the mansion might "leap from their windows into jungles, and steppes, and wildernesses, where the lion and the panther would be more at home than the lady in her silken sheen."