t our prizes and honors are for. Progress first,
perfection afterward, is our maxim. We value and reward originality,
nevertheless, and only count it a stronger necessity to see not merely
that no talented or happily circumstanced few, but that not even any one
or two fortunate neighborhoods, shall presently be capturing all the
prizes. Hence the rules already cited, which a prompt discovery of this
tendency forced upon us.

About this copying: no art is more inoffensively imitated than gardening
but unluckily none is more easily, or more absurdly, miscopied. A safe
way is to copy the gardener rather than the garden. To copy any
performance in a way to do it honor we must discern and adapt its art
without mimicking its act. To miscopy is far easier--we have only to
mimic the act and murder the art. I once heard a man ask an architect
if it would not answer to give his plan to the contractor and let him
work it out without the architect's supervision.

"My dear sir," the architect replied, "you wouldn't know the corpse."

I suppose one reason why even the miscopying of gardens provokes so
little offence is that the acts it mimics have no art it can murder.
Mrs. Budd sets out her one little "high geraingia" in the middle of her
tiny grass-plat (probably trimming it to look like a ballet-dancer on
one leg). Whereupon Mrs. Mudd, the situation of whose house and grounds
is not in the least like her neighbor's, plants and trims hers the same
way and feels sure it has the same effect, for--why shouldn't it?

The prize-winning copyist I am telling of copied principles only. To
have copied mere performance would have been particularly unlucky, for
though his garden stands within fifty yards of the one from which it
drew its inspiration the two are so differently located that the same
art principles demand of them very different performances. An old-time
lover of gardens whom I have to quote at second-hand mentions in
contrast "gardens to look in upon" and "gardens to look out from." The
garden I have described at length is planned to be looked in upon; most
town gardens must be, of course; but its competitor across the street,
of which I am about to give account, is an exception. The lot has a very
broad front and very little depth--at one side almost none, at the other
barely enough for a small house and a few feet of front yard. Why there
should be a drive I cannot say, but it is so well taken into the general
scheme that t