in a little suburban garden. Symmetry,
elegance and beauty, (--no _sublimity_ or _grandeur_--) trimness,
snugness, privacy, cleanliness, comfort, and convenience--the results of
a happy conjunction of art and nature--are all that we can aim at within
a limited extent of ground. In a small parterre we either trace with
pleasure the marks of the gardener's attention or are disgusted with his
negligence. In a mere patch of earth around a domestic dwelling nature
ought not to be left entirely to herself.

What is agreeable in one sphere of life is offensive in another. A dirty
smock frock and a soiled face in a ploughman's child who has been
swinging on rustic gates a long summer morning or rolling down the
slopes of hills, or grubbing in the soil of his small garden, may remind
us, not unpleasantly, of one of Gainsborough's pictures; but we look for
a different sort of nature on the canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds or Sir
Thomas Lawrence, or in the brilliant drawing-rooms of the nobility; and
yet an Earl's child looks and moves at least as _naturally_ as a
peasant's.

There is nature every where--in the palace as well as in the hut, in the
cultivated garden as well as in the wild wood. Civilized life is, after
all, as natural as savage life. All our faculties are natural, and
civilized man cultivates his mental powers and studies the arts of life
by as true an instinct as that which leads the savage to make the most
of his mud hut, and to improve himself or his child as a hunter, a
fisherman, or a warrior. The mind of man is the noblest work of its
Maker (--in this world--) and the movements of man's mind may be quite
as natural, and quite as poetical too, as the life that rises from the
ground. It is as natural for the mind, as it is for a tree or flower to
advance towards perfection. Nature suggests art, and art again imitates
and approximates to nature, and this principle of action and reaction
brings man by degrees towards that point of comparative excellence for
which God seems to have intended him. The mind of a Milton or a
Shakespeare is surely not in a more unnatural condition than that of an
ignorant rustic. We ought not then to decry refinement nor deem all
connection of art with nature an offensive incongruity. A noble mansion
in a spacious and well kept park is an object which even an observer who
has no share himself in the property may look upon with pleasure. It
makes him proud of his race.[116] We cannot witn