The English style of landscape-gardening being founded on natural principles must be recognized by true taste in all countries.  Even in Rome, when art was most allowed to predominate over nature, there were occasional instances of that correct feeling for rural beauty which the English during the last century and a half have exhibited more conspicuously than other nations.  Atticus preferred Tully’s villa at Arpinum to all his other villas; because at Arpinum, Nature predominated over art.  Our Kents and Browns[031] never expressed a greater contempt, than was expressed by Atticus, for all formal and artificial decorations of natural scenery.

The spot where Cicero’s villa stood, was, in the time of Middleton, possessed by a convent of monks and was called the Villa of St. Dominic.  It was built, observes Mr. Dunlop, in the year 1030, from the fragments of the Arpine Villa!

    Art, glory, Freedom, fail—­but Nature still is fair.

“Nothing,” says Mr. Kelsall, “can be imagined finer than the surrounding landscape.  The deep azure of the sky, unvaried by a single cloud—­Sora on a rock at the foot of the precipitous Appennines—­both banks of the Garigliano covered with vineyards—­the fragor aquarum, alluded to by Atticus in his work De Legibus—­the coolness, the rapidity and ultramarine hue of the Fibrenus—­the noise of its cataracts—­the rich turquoise color of the Liris—­the minor Appennines round Arpino, crowned with umbrageous oaks to the very summits—­present scenery hardly elsewhere to be equalled, certainly not to be surpassed, even in Italy.”

This description of an Italian landscape can hardly fail to charm the imagination of the coldest reader; but after all, I cannot help confessing to so inveterate a partiality for dear old England as to be delighted with the compliment which Gray, the poet, pays to English scenery when he prefers it to the scenery of Italy.  “Mr. Walpole,” writes the poet from Italy, “says, our memory sees more than our eyes in this country.  This is extremely true, since for realities WINDSOR or RICHMOND HILL is infinitely preferable to ALBANO or FRESCATI.”

Sir Walter Scott, with all his patriotic love for his own romantic land, could not withhold his tribute to the loveliness of Richmond Hill,—­its “unrivalled landscape” its “sea of verdure.”

“They” (The Duke of Argyle and Jeanie Deans) “paused for a moment on the brow of a hill, to gaze on the unrivalled landscape it presented.  A huge sea of verdure, with crossing and intersecting promontories of massive and tufted groves was tenanted by numberless flocks and herds which seemed to wander unrestrained and unbounded through the rich pastures.  The Thames, here turreted with villas, and there garlanded with forests, moved on slowly and placidly, like the mighty monarch of the scene, to whom all its other beauties were but accessaries, and bore on its bosom an hundred