overbalance every disadvantageous consideration, and man would raise food for himself and his domestic animals in the region where his daily labour gained his daily bread.

There would thus arise in the wild desert a hardy and moral population, living by the axe and mattock, pursuing their useful occupation in a mode equally favourable to health and morality. The woods, requiring in succession planting, pruning, thinning, felling, and barking, would furnish to such labourers a constant course of employment. They would be naturally attached to the soil on which they dwelt, and the proprietor who afforded them the means of life would be very undeserving if he had not his share of that attachment.

In a

word, the melancholy maxim of the poet would be confuted, and the race of bold peasantry, whom want and devastation had driven from these vast wilds, would be restored to their native country. This circumstance alone deserves the most profound attention from every class of proprietors; whether the philosophical economist, who looks with anxiety for the mode of occupying and supporting an excess of population, or the juvenile sportsman, who seeks the mode of multiplying his game, and increasing the number of his gardes de chasse. The woods which he plants will serve the first purpose, and, kindly treated, his band of foresters will assist in protecting them.

We may be thought to have laboured too long to prove propositions which no one can reasonably dispute; yet so incalculably important is the object

so comparatively indifferent is the attention of proprietors, that it becomes a duty to the country to omit no opportunity of recurring to the subject.

The only decent pretext which we hear alleged for resisting a call which is sounded from every quarter, is the selfish excuse, that the profits of plantations make a tardy and distant return. To a person who argues in this manner it is in vain to speak of the future welfare of the country, or of the immediate benefit to the poorer inhabitants, or of the honour justly attached to the memory of an extensive improver, since he must be insensible even to the benefit which his own family must derive from the improvement recommended; we can, notwithstanding, meet him on his own ground, and affirm that the advantage to the proprietor who has planted a hundred acres begins at the very commencement of the undertaking, and may be realized whenever it is the pleasure of the proprietor that such realization shall take place. If, for example, he chooses to sell a plantation at five years old, or at an earlier period, there is little doubt that it will be accounted worth the sum which the plantation cost him, in addition to the value of the land, and also the interest upon the expense so laid out. After this period the value increases in a compound ratio: and at any period when the planter chooses to sell his property, he must and will derive an advantage from his plantations, corresponding to their state of advancement. It is true that the landed proprietor's own interest will teach him not to be too eager in

realizing the profits of his plantations, because every year that he retains them adds rapidly to their value. But still the value exists as much as that of the plate in his strong-box, and can be converted as easily into money, should he be disposed to sell the plantations which he has formed.

All this is demonstrable even to the prejudices of avarice itself, in its blindest mood; but the indifference to this great rural improvement arises, we have reason to believe, not so much out of the actual lucre of gain as the fatal vis inertia-that indolence which induces the lords of the soil to be satisfied with what they can obtain from it by immediate rent, rather than encounter the expense and trouble of attempting the modes of amelioration which require immediate expense-and, what is, perhaps, more grudged by the first-born of Egypt-a little future attention. To such we can only say, that improvement by plantation is at once the easiest, the cheapest, and the least precarious mode of increasing the immediate value, as well as the future income, of their estates, and that therefore it is we exhort them to take to heart the exhortation of the dying Scotch laird to his son :-" Be aye sticking in a tree, Jock-it will be growing whilst you are sleeping."

ARTICLE XV.

ON LANDSCAPE GARDENING.

[The Planter's Guide; or, a Practical Essay on the best Method of giving immediate effect to Wood, by the removal of large Trees and Underwood. By Sir HENRY STEUART, Bart. Edinburgh, 8vo, 1828.- Quarterly Review, March, 1828.]

THE notable paradox, that the residence of a proprietor upon his estate is of as little consequence as the bodily presence of a stockholder upon Exchange, has, we believe, been renounced. At least, as in the case of the Duchess of Suffolk's relationship to her own child, the vulgar continue to be of opinion that there is some difference in favour of the next hamlet and village, and even of the vicinage in general, when the squire spends his rents at the manor-house, instead of cutting a figure in France or Italy. A celebrated politician used to say he would willingly bring in one bill to make poaching felony, another to encourage the breed of foxes, and a third to revive the decayed amusements of cock-fighting and bull-baitingthat he would make, in short, any sacrifice to the

humours and prejudices of the country gentlemen, in their most extravagant form, providing only he could prevail upon them to "dwell in their own houses, be the patrons of their own tenantry, and the fathers of their own children." However we might be disposed to stop short of these liberal concessions, we agree so far with the senator by whom they were enounced, as to think every thing of great consequence which furnishes an additional source of profit or of pleasure to the resident proprietor, and induces him to continue to support the useful and honourable character of a country gentleman, an epithet so pleasing in English ears,so dear to English feelings of independence and patriotism. The manly lines of Akenside cannot fail to rush on the memory of our readers, nor was there such occasion for the reproach when it flowed from the pen of the author, as there is at this present day.

"O blind of choice, and to yourselves untrue!

The young grove shoots, their bloom the fields renew,
The mansion asks its lord, the swains their friend,
While he doth riot's orgies haply share,

Or tempt the gamester's dark destroying snare,
Or at some courtly shrine with slavish incense bend!"

Amidst the various sources of amusement which a country residence offers to its proprietor, the improvement of the appearance of the house and adjacent demesne will ever hold a very high place. Field-sports, at an early season in life, have more of immediate excitation; nor are we amongst those who condemn the gallant chase, though we cannot, now-a-days, follow it: but a country life