, and had imbibed his taste
for flowers, and for horticulture. But instead of murdering botanical
names, I will rather conduct you to the POLICY, or pleasure-garden,
which the taste of Joshua or his father had extended on the banks
betwixt the house and river. This also, in contradistinction to the
prevailing simplicity, was ornamented in an unusual degree. There were
various compartments, the connexion of which was well managed, and
although the whole ground did not exceed five or six acres, it was so
much varied as to seem four times larger. The space contained close
alleys and open walks; a very pretty artificial waterfall; a fountain
also, consisting of a considerable jet-d'eau, whose streams glittered in
the sunbeams and exhibited a continual rainbow. There was a cabinet of
verdure, as the French call it, to cool the summer heat, and there was
a terrace sheltered from the north-east by a noble holly hedge, with all
its glittering spears where you might have the full advantage of the sun
in the clear frosty days of winter.

I know that you, Alan, will condemn all this as bad and antiquated; for,
ever since Dodsley has described the Leasowes, and talked of Brown's
imitations of nature and Horace Walpole's late Essay on Gardening, you
are all for simple nature--condemn walking up and down stairs in the
open air and declare for wood and wilderness. But NE QUID NIMIS. I would
not deface a scene of natural grandeur or beauty, by the introduction
of crowded artificial decorations; yet such may, I think, be very
interesting, where the situation, in its natural state, otherwise has no
particular charms.

So that when I have a country-house (who can say how soon?) you may
look for grottoes, and cascades, and fountains; nay if you vex me by
contradiction, perhaps I may go the length of a temple--so provoke me
not, for you see of what enormities I am capable.

At any rate, Alan, had you condemned as artificial the rest of Friend
Geddes's grounds, there is a willow walk by the very verge of the
stream, so sad, so solemn, and so silent, that it must have commanded
your admiration. The brook, restrained at the ultimate boundary of the
grounds by a natural dam-dike or ledge of rocks, seemed, even in
its present swollen state, scarcely to glide along: and the pale
willow-trees, dropping their long branches into the stream, gathered
around them little coronals of the foam that floated down from the more
rapid stream above. The hi