ng but big
bowling-greens, like sheets of green paper, with a parcel of round
clumps scattered over them, like so many spots of ink, flicked at
random out of a pen,[4.1] and a solitary animal here and there looking
as if it were lost, that I did not think it was for all the world like
Hounslow Heath, thinly sprinkled over with bushes and highwaymen."

"Sir," said Mr Milestone, "you will have the goodness to make a
distinction between the picturesque and the beautiful."

"Will I?" said Sir Patrick, "och! but I won't. For what is beautiful?
That what pleases the eye. And what pleases the eye? Tints variously
broken and blended. Now, tints variously broken and blended constitute
the picturesque."

"Allow me," said Mr Gall. "I distinguish the picturesque and the
beautiful, and I add to them, in the laying out of grounds, a third
and distinct character, which I call _unexpectedness_."

"Pray, sir," said Mr Milestone, "by what name do you distinguish this
character, when a person walks round the grounds for the second
time?"[4.2]

Mr Gall bit his lips, and inwardly vowed to revenge himself on
Milestone, by cutting up his next publication.

A long controversy now ensued concerning the picturesque and the
beautiful, highly edifying to Squire Headlong.

The three philosophers stopped, as they wound round a projecting point
of rock, to contemplate a little boat which was gliding over the
tranquil surface of the lake below.

"The blessings of civilisation," said Mr Foster, "extend themselves to
the meanest individuals of the community. That boatman, singing as he
sails along, is, I have no doubt, a very happy, and, comparatively to
the men of his class some centuries back, a very enlightened and
intelligent man."

"As a partisan of the system of the moral perfectibility of the human
race," said Mr Escot,--who was always for considering things on a
large scale, and whose thoughts immediately wandered from the lake to
the ocean, from the little boat to a ship of the line,--"you will
probably be able to point out to me the degree of improvement that you
suppose to have taken place in the character of a sailor, from the
days when Jason sailed through the Cyanean Symplegades, or Noah moored
his ark on the summit of Ararat."

"If you talk to me," said Mr Foster, "of mythological personages, of
course I cannot meet you on fair grounds."

"We will begin, if you please, then," said Mr Escot, "no further back
than the battle