Foot-paths in small gardens need not be broader than will allow two
persons to walk abreast with ease. A spacious garden may have walks of
greater breadth. A path for one person only is inconvenient and has a
mean look.
I have made most of the foregoing observations in something of a spirit
of opposition to those Landscape gardeners who I think once carried a
true principle to an absurd excess. I dislike, as much as any one can,
the old topiary style of our remote ancestors, but the talk about free
nature degenerated at last into downright cant, and sheer extravagance;
the reformers were for bringing weeds and jungle right under our parlour
windows, and applied to an acre of ground those rules of Landscape
gardening which required a whole county for their proper
exemplification. It is true that Milton's Paradise had "no nice art" in
it, but then it was not a little suburban pleasure ground but a world.
When Milton alluded to private gardens, he spoke of their trimness.
Retired Leisure
That in _trim_ gardens takes his pleasure.
The larger an estate the less necessary is it to make it merely neat,
and symmetrical, especially in those parts of the ground that are
distant from the house; but near the architecture some degree of finish
and precision is always necessary, or at least advisable, to prevent the
too sudden contrast between the straight lines and artificial
construction of the dwelling and the flowing curves and wild but
beautiful irregularities of nature unmoulded by art.
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