ruth, that the young student, familiarized to
the dirtiness and disorder of many colleges pent within narrow bounds in
populous cities, is rendered in a measure insensible to the elegant
beauties of art and nature. It seems to me far from an exaggeration,
that good professors are not more essential to a college, than a
spacious garden, sweetly ornamented, but without any thing glaring or
fantastic, is upon the whole to inspire our youth with a taste no less
for simplicity than for elegance. In this respect the University of
Oxford may justly be deemed a model."

It may be expected that I should offer a few hints on the laying out of
gardens. Much has been said (by writers on ornamental and landscape
gardening) on _art_ and _nature_, and almost always has it been implied
that these must necessarily be in direct opposition. I am far from being
of this opinion. If art and nature be not in some points of view almost
identical, they are at least very good friends, or may easily be made
so. They are not necessarily hostile. They admit of the most harmonious
combinations. In no place are such combinations more easy or more proper
than in a garden. Walter Scott very truly calls a garden the child of
Art. But is it not also the child of Nature?--of Nature and Art
together? To attempt to exclude art--or even, the appearance of
art--from a small garden enclosure, is idle and absurd. He who objects to
all art in the arrangement of a flower-bed, ought, if consistent with
himself, to turn away with an expression of disgust from a well arranged
nosegay in a rich porcelain vase. But who would not loathe or laugh at
such manifest affectation or such thoroughly bad taste? As there is a
time for every thing, so also is there a place for every thing. No man
of true judgment would desire to trace the hand of human art on the form
of nature in remote and gigantic forests, and amidst vast mountains, as
irregular as the billows of a troubled sea. In such scenery there is a
sublime grace in wildness,--_there_ "the very weeds are beautiful." But
what true judgment would be enchanted with weeds and wildness in the
small parterre. As Pope rightly says, we must

Consult the genius of the place in all.

It is pleasant to enter a rural lane overgrown with field-flowers, or to
behold an extensive common irregularly decorated with prickly gorse or
fern and thistle, but surely no man of taste would admire nature in this
wild and dishevelled state