uestion be
fairly looked into, and its different bearings examined. No one can
assert that, if this intended mode of approach be not effected, anything
will be taken away that is actually possessed. The wrong, if any, must
lie in the unwarrantable obstruction of an attainable benefit. First,
then, let us consider the probable amount of that benefit.

Elaborate gardens, with topiary works, were in high request, even among
our remote ancestors, but the relish for choice and picturesque natural
_scenery_ (a poor and mean word which requires an apology, but will be
generally understood), is quite of recent origin. Our earlier
travellers--Ray, the naturalist, one of the first men of his age--Bishop
Burnet, and others who had crossed the Alps, or lived some time in
Switzerland, are silent upon the sublimity and beauty of those regions;
and Burnet even uses these words, speaking of the Grisons--'When they
have made up estates elsewhere they are glad to leave Italy and the best
parts of Germany, and to come and live among those mountains of which
the very sight is enough to fill a man with horror.' The accomplished
Evelyn, giving an account of his journey from Italy through the Alps,
dilates upon the terrible, the melancholy, and the uncomfortable; but,
till he comes to the fruitful country in the neighbourhood of Geneva,
not a syllable of delight or praise. In the _Sacra Telluris Theoria_ of
the other Burnet there is a passage--omitted, however, in his own
English translation of the work--in which he gives utterance to his
sensations, when, from a particular spot he beheld a tract of the Alps
rising before him on the one hand, and on the other the Mediterranean
Sea spread beneath him. Nothing can be worthier of the magnificent
appearances he describes than his language. In a noble strain also does
the Poet Gray address, in a Latin Ode, the _Religio loci_ at the Grande
Chartruise. But before his time, with the exception of the passage from
Thomas Burnet just alluded to, there is not, I believe, a single English
traveller whose published writings would disprove the assertion, that,
where precipitous rocks and mountains are mentioned at all, they are
spoken of as objects of dislike and fear, and not of admiration. Even
Gray himself, describing, in his Journal, the steeps at the entrance of
Borrowdale, expresses his terror in the language of Dante:--'Let us not
speak of them, but look and pass on.' In my youth, I lived some time in