Headlong Hall | Page 7

Squire Headlong and Mr Milestone leading the van,
they commenced their perambulation.
CHAPTER IV
The Grounds
"I perceive," said Mr Milestone, after they had walked a few paces,
"these grounds have never been touched by the finger of taste."

"The place is quite a wilderness," said Squire Headlong: "for, during
the latter part of my father's life, while I was finishing my education, he
troubled himself about nothing but the cellar, and suffered everything
else to go to rack and ruin. A mere wilderness, as you see, even now in
December; but in summer a complete nursery of briers, a forest of
thistles, a plantation of nettles, without any live stock but goats, that
have eaten up all the bark of the trees. Here you see is the pedestal of a
statue, with only half a leg and four toes remaining: there were many
here once. When I was a boy, I used to sit every day on the shoulders of
Hercules: what became of him I have never been able to ascertain.
Neptune has been lying these seven years in the dust-hole; Atlas had
his head knocked off to fit him for propping a shed; and only the day
before yesterday we fished Bacchus out of the horse-pond."
"My dear sir," said Mr Milestone, "accord me your permission to wave
the wand of enchantment over your grounds. The rocks shall be blown
up, the trees shall be cut down, the wilderness and all its goats shall
vanish like mist. Pagodas and Chinese bridges, gravel walks and
shrubberies, bowling-greens, canals, and clumps of larch, shall rise
upon its ruins. One age, sir, has brought to light the treasures of ancient
learning; a second has penetrated into the depths of metaphysics; a
third has brought to perfection the science of astronomy; but it was
reserved for the exclusive genius of the present times, to invent the
noble art of picturesque gardening, which has given, as it were, a new
tint to the complexion of nature, and a new outline to the physiognomy
of the universe!"
"Give me leave," said Sir Patrick O'Prism, "to take an exception to that
same. Your system of levelling, and trimming, and clipping, and
docking, and clumping, and polishing, and cropping, and shaving,
destroys all the beautiful intricacies of natural luxuriance, and all the
graduated harmonies of light and shade, melting into one another, as
you see them on that rock over yonder. I never saw one of your
improved places, as you call them, and which are nothing 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."