"Athenaeum." Again he says, with a delightful pointedness of
manner,--"No transaction in America reflects any discredit on a man,
unless he loses money by it.... I remember an Englishman, after
repeating all the things that could fill a stranger's mind with trouble
and horror, said, with a very heavy sigh, as he was going out of the
house, 'It is the Devil's own country, to be sure!'"

The "Times" newspaper never said a prettier word than that!

* * * * *

Mr. Robert Brown was a worthier man, and, I suspect, a better farmer; he
was one of the earlier types of those East-Lothian men who made their
neighborhood the garden of Scotland. He was also the author of a book on
"Rural Affairs," the editor for fifteen years of the well-known
"Edinburgh Farmers' Magazine," and (if I am not mistaken) communicated
the very valuable article on "Agriculture" to the old "Encyclopaedia
Britannica."

At this period, too, I find an Earl of Dundonald (Archibald Cochrane)
writing upon the relations of chemistry to agriculture,--and a little
later, Richard Kirwan, F.R.S., indulging in vagaries upon the same
broad, and still unsettled, subject.

Joseph Cradock, a quiet, cultivated gentleman, who had been on terms of
familiarity with Johnson, Garrick, and Goldsmith, published in 1775 his
"Village Memoirs," in which Lancelot Brown has a little fun pointed at
him, under the name of "Layout," the general "undertaker" for gardens.
Sir Uvedale Price, too, a man of somewhat stronger calibre, and of great
taste, (fully demonstrated on his own place of Foxley,) made poor Brown
the target for some well-turned witticisms, and, what was far better,
demonstrated the near relationship which should always exist between the
aims of the landscape-painter and those of the landscape-gardener. I am
inclined to think that Brown was a little unfairly used by these new
writers, and that he had won a success which provoked a great deal of
jealousy. A popularity too great is always dangerous. Sir Uvedale was a
man of strong conservative tendencies, and believed no more in the
levelling of men than in the levelling of hills. He found his love for
the picturesque sated in many of those hoary old avenues which, under
Brown, had been given to the axe. I suspect he would have forgiven the
presence of a clipped yew in a landscape where it had thriven for
centuries; the moss of age could give picturesqueness even to formality.
He speaks so