ions in this cheap form. Nor does
my plan terminate with the ornaments of forests, parks, and
hedge-rows; but I ask, why many hedges themselves might not, in like
manner, consist of gooseberry and currant trees in their most
luxuriant varieties, intermingled with raspberries, nuts, filberts,
bullaces, &c.? Not to give this useful and productive face to a
country, appears to me to be shutting our eyes to the light; to prefer
the useless to the useful; to be so inconsistent as to expect plenty
where we take no means to create it; or, in other words; to sow tares
and desire to gather wheat, or expect grapes where we have planted
only thorns. Let us, even in this point, condescend to borrow a lesson
from an illustrious, though oft despised, neighbour, who, it appears
by the evidence of all travellers, has taken care that the roads and
hedges of France should be covered with productive fruit trees. If
such also were the condition of Britain, how insignificant would
become the anxious questions about a Corn Bill, or the price of any
single article of food. We should then partake of the ample stores
provided, and perhaps contemplated, by our forefathers, when they
rendered indigenous the fruit-trees of warmer climates; and, feeling
less solicitude in regard to the gross wants of animal subsistence, we
should be enabled to employ our faculties more generally in improving
our moral and social condition. We should thus extend the principle,
and reduce the general purpose of all productive cultivation to an
analogous economy, enjoying the fullest triumph which our climate
would admit, of the fortunate combinations of human art over the
inaptitude and primitive barbarity of nature.

The sequestered village of Roehampton consists of about thirty or
forty small houses, in contact; and of a dozen monastic mansions,
inhabited by noblemen and well-accredited traders. Each of the latter
being surrounded by twenty or thirty acres of garden and
pleasure-grounds, and bounded by high brick walls, which in every
direction line the roads, Roehampton presents to a stranger a most
cheerless aspect. As the plantations are old, the full-grown oaks,
elms, and chesnuts, within the walls, add to the gloom, and call to
mind those ages of mental paralysis when Druids and Monks gave effect
to their impostures by similar arrangements.

They serve to prove how slavishly men are the creatures of imitation;
how seldom, in how few things, and by what small