tells us wood should be planted, and we wonder that a hundred people had
not said the same thing before; on such a river-meadow the grassy level
should lie open to the sun, and we wonder who could ever have doubted
it. Nor is it in matters of taste alone, I think, that the best things
we hear seem always to have a smack of oldness in them,--as if we
_remembered_ their virtue. "Capital!" we say; "but hasn't it been said
before?" or, "Precisely! I wonder I didn't do or say the same thing
myself." Whenever you hear such criticisms upon any performance, you may
be sure that it has been directed by a sound instinct. It is not a sort
of criticism any one is apt to make upon flashy rhetoric, or upon flash
gardening.

Whately alludes to the analogy between landscape-painting and
landscape-gardening: the true artists in either pursuit aim at the
production of rich pictorial effects, but their means are different.
Does the painter seek to give steepness to a declivity?--then he may add
to his shading a figure or two toiling up. The gardener, indeed, cannot
plant a man there; but a copse upon the summit will add to the apparent
height, and he may indicate the difficulty of ascent by a hand-rail
running along the path. The painter will extend his distance by the
_diminuendo_ of his mountains, or of trees stretching toward the
horizon: the gardener has, indeed, no handling of successive mountains,
but he may increase apparent distance by leafy avenues leading toward
the limit of vision; he may even exaggerate the effect still further by
so graduating the size of his trees as to make a counterfeit
perspective.

When I read such a book as this of Whately's,--so informed and leavened
as it is by an elegant taste,--I am most painfully impressed by the
shortcomings of very much which is called good landscape-gardening with