A Gainsborough or a Morland would seek his subjects in remote villages and a Watteau or a Stothard in the well kept pleasure ground.  The ruder nature of woods and villages, of sturdy ploughmen and the healthy though soiled and ragged children in rural neighbourhoods, affords a by no means unpleasing contrast and introduction to the trim trees and smoothly undulating lawns, and curved walks, and gay parterres, and fine ladies and well dressed and graceful children on some old ancestral estate.  We look for rusticity in the village, and for elegance in the park.  The sleek and noble air of patrician trees, standing proudly on the rich velvet sward, the order and grace and beauty of all that meets the eye, lead us, as I have said already, to form a high opinion of the owner.  In this we may of course be sometimes disappointed; but a man’s character is generally to be traced in almost every object around him over which he has the power of a proprietor, and in few things are a man’s taste and habits more distinctly marked than in his park and garden.  If we find the owner of a neatly kept garden and an elegant mansion slovenly, rude and vulgar in appearance and manners, we inevitably experience that shock of surprize which is excited by every thing that is incongruous or out of keeping.  On the other hand if the garden be neglected and overgrown with weeds, or if every thing in its arrangement indicate a want of taste, and a disregard of neatness and order, we feel no astonishment whatever in discovering that the proprietor is as negligent of his mind and person as of his shrubberies and his lawns.

A civilized country ought not to look like a savage one.  We need not have wild nature in front of our neatly finished porticos.  Nothing can be more strictly artificial than all architecture.  It would be absurd to erect an elegantly finished residence in the heart of a jungle.  There should be an harmonious gradation from the house to the grounds, and true taste ought not to object to terraces of elegant design and graceful urns and fine statues in the immediate neighbourhood of a noble dwelling.

Undoubtedly as a general rule, the undulating curve in garden scenery is preferable to straight lines or abrupt turns or sharp angles, but if there should happen to be only a few yards between the outer gateway and the house, could anything be more fantastical or preposterous than an attempt to give the ground between them a serpentine irregularity?  Even in the most spacious grounds the walks should not seem too studiously winding, as if the short turns were meant for no other purpose than to perplex or delay the walker.[118] They should have a natural sweep, and seem to meander rather in accordance with the nature of the ground and the points to which they lead than in obedience to some idle sport of fancy.  They should not remind us of Gray’s description of the divisions of an old mansion: 

    Long passages that lead to nothing.