Foot-paths in small gardens need not be broader than will allow two persons to walk abreast with ease.  A spacious garden may have walks of greater breadth.  A path for one person only is inconvenient and has a mean look.

I have made most of the foregoing observations in something of a spirit of opposition to those Landscape gardeners who I think once carried a true principle to an absurd excess.  I dislike, as much as any one can, the old topiary style of our remote ancestors, but the talk about free nature degenerated at last into downright cant, and sheer extravagance; the reformers were for bringing weeds and jungle right under our parlour windows, and applied to an acre of ground those rules of Landscape gardening which required a whole county for their proper exemplification.  It is true that Milton’s Paradise had “no nice art” in it, but then it was not a little suburban pleasure ground but a world.  When Milton alluded to private gardens, he spoke of their trimness.

                            Retired Leisure
    That in trim gardens takes his pleasure.

The larger an estate the less necessary is it to make it merely neat, and symmetrical, especially in those parts of the ground that are distant from the house; but near the architecture some degree of finish and precision is always necessary, or at least advisable, to prevent the too sudden contrast between the straight lines and artificial construction of the dwelling and the flowing curves and wild but beautiful irregularities of nature unmoulded by art.  A garden adjacent to the house should give the owner a sense of home.  He should not feel himself abroad at his own door.  If it were only for the sake of variety there should be some distinction between the private garden and the open field.  If the garden gradually blends itself with a spacious park or chase, the more the ground recedes from the house the more it may legitimately assume the aspect of a natural landscape.  It will then be necessary to appeal to the eye of a landscape gardener or a painter or a poet before the owner, if ignorant of the principles of fine art, attempt the completion of the general design.

I should like to see my Native friends who have extensive grounds, vary the shape of their tanks, but if they dislike a more natural form of water, irregular or winding, and are determined to have them with four sharp corners, let them at all events avoid the evil of several small tanks in the same “compound.”  A large tank is more likely to have good water and to retain it through the whole summer season than a smaller one and is more easily kept clean and grassy to the water’s edge.  I do not say that it would be proper to have a piece of winding water in a small compound—­that indeed would be impracticable.  But even an oval or round tank would be better than a square one.[119]

If the Native gentry could obtain the aid of tasteful gardeners, I would recommend that the level land should be varied with an occasional artificial elevation, nicely sloped or graduated; but Native malees would be sure to aim rather at the production of abrupt round knobs resembling warts or excrescences than easy and natural undulations of the surface.