right angles, and yet elegantly, as it frequently does in the oak; but it must immediately form some contrasting sweep, or the junction will be awkward.

All forms that are unnatural, displease. A tree lopped into a maypole, as you generally see in the hedgerows of Surrey, and some other countries, is disgusting. Clipped yews, lime hedges, and pollards, are, for the same reason, disagreeable: and yet I have sometimes seen a pollard produce a good effect, when Nature has been suffered, for some years, to bring it again into form; but I never saw a good effect produced by a pollard, on which some single stem was left to grow into a tree. The stem is of a different growth: it is disproportioned, and always unites awkwardly with the trunk.

We have had particular occasion to notice the bad effects of this practice of lopping trees in France, where the trees. in hedgerows, and in avenues, are clipped to the very bone. It would be curious, and we suspect it would be somewhat difficult, to dissect out those ancient feelings which have induced a whole nation to make a war to the knife against Nature, as if she were some hydra, or other monster, for the extermination of which every one was called on to contribute his aid. We remember another evil too. When we happened to be travelling in that country in the beginning of August, we found, to our astonishment, that a great proportion of the trees were altogether stripped of their leaves; and the mystery was soon explained to us, by our frequently seeing, as we drove along, the shepherds, and those who took charge of swine, occupied in pulling off the leaves, and beating them down with poles, for the use of the animals, who ran greedily towards the food thus provided for them. This is to be attributed to the continuity of grain cultivation over the surface of France, where, except in the vicinity of the sea, on the northern coast, or in such inland provinces as the Limousin and Alsace, any thing like a stretch of pasturage, or fields regularly laid down for that purpose, are never seen.

Certainly clipped yews and lime hedges are disagreeable when out of place, but they are well in harmony with the ancient garden of some baronial castle, where every thing symmetrical is in keeping, and intimately associated with the recollections of our ancestors, who planted and who trimmed them, and who walked along their formal alleys in courtly guise, choosing the sun or the shade, as best fitted the humour of the fair and

peerless ladies of their love, upon whose smiles they lived, regardless of all other suns. Think of the rich pictures of

Watteau !

Not only all forms that are unnatural displease, but even natural forms, when they bear a resemblance to art, unless indeed these forms are characteristic of the species. A cypress pleases in a conic form; but an oak or an elm trimmed into that appearance, would disgust. In the cypress, Nature adapts the spray and branches to the form of the tree. In the oak and elm, the spray and branches form a different character.

Lightness, also, is a characteristic of beauty in a tree : for though there are beautiful trees of a heavy, as well as of a light form, yet their extremities must in some parts be separated, and hang with a degree of looseness. from the fullness of the foliage, which occupies the middle of the tree, or the whole will only be a large bush. From position indeed, and contrast, heaviness, though in itself a deformity, may be of singular use in the composition both of natural and of artificial landscape.

It

A tree also must be well balanced to be beautiful. may have form, and it may have lightness, and yet lose all its effect by wanting a proper poise. The bole must appear to support the branches. We do not desire to see it supporting its burden with the perpendicular firmness of a column. An easy sweep is always agreeable; but at the same time it should not be such a sweep as discovers one side plainly overbalanced.

On bleak sea-coasts, trees generally take an unbalanced form and indeed, in general, some foreign cause must operate to occasion it; for Nature, working freely, is as much inclined to balance a tree upon its trunk, as an animal upon its legs.

And yet, in some circumstances, I have seen beauty arise even from an unbalanced tree; but it must arise from some peculiar situation, which gives it a local propriety. A tree, for instance, hanging from a rock, though totally unpoised, may be beautiful; or it may have a good effect when we see it bending over a road, because it corresponds with its peculiar situation. We do not in these cases admire it as a tree, but as the

adjunct of an effect, the beauty of which does not give the eye leisure to attend to the deformity of the instrument through which the effect is produced.

Without these requisites, therefore, form, lightness, and a proper balance, no tree can have that species of beauty which we call picturesque.

SECTION III.

BESIDES these requisites of beauty in a tree, there are other things of an adventitious kind, which often add great beauty to it. And here I cannot help lamenting the capricious nature of picturesque ideas.* In many instances they run counter to utility, and in nothing more than in the adventitious beauties ascribed to trees. Many of these are derived from the injuries the tree receives, or the diseases to which it is subject. Mr Lawson, a naturalist of the last age, thus enumerates them: " How many forests and woods," says he, "have we, wherein you shall have, for one lively, thriving tree, four, nay sometimes twenty-four, evil thriving, rotten, and dying trees: what rottenness! what hollowness! what dead arms, withered tops, curtailed trunks! what loads of mosses, drooping boughs, and dying branches, shall you see every where !"+

Now all these maladies, which our distressed naturalist bemoans with so much feeling, are often capital sources of picturesque beauty, both in the wild scenes of nature, and in artificial landscape.

What is more beautiful, for instance, on a rugged foreground, than an old tree with a hollow trunk? or with a dead arm, a drooping bough, or a dying branch? all which phrases, I apprehend, are nearly synonymous.

From the withered top also great use and beauty may result in the composition of landscape, when we wish to

* We see here how our author becomes bewildered, from lack of that light which afterwards so happily dawned on Mr Alison.

break the regularity of some continued line which we would not entirely hide.

By the curtailed trunk, I suppose, Mr Lawson means a tree, whose principal stem has been shattered by winds, or some other accident, while the lower part of it is left in vigour. This is also a beautiful circumstance, and its application equally useful in landscape. The withered top just breaks the lines of an eminence: the curtailed trunk discovers the whole; while the lateral branches, which are vigorous and healthy in both, hide any part of the lower landscape, which, wanting variety, is better

veiled.

For the use and beauty of the withered top and curtailed trunk, we need only appeal to the works of Salvator Rosa, in many of which we find them of great use. Salvator had often occasion for an object on his foregrounds, as large as the trunk of a tree; when the whole tree together, in its full state of grandeur, would have been an encumbrance to him. A young tree, or a bush, might probably have served his purpose with regard to composition; but such dwarfs and striplings could not have preserved the dignity of his subject, like the ruins of a noble tree. These splendid remnants of decaying grandeur speak to the imagination in a style of eloquence, which the stripling cannot reach: they record the history of some storm, some blast of lightning, or other great event, which transfers its grand ideas to the landscape; and in the representation of elevated subjects assists the sublime.

Whether these maladies in trees ever produce beauty in adorned Nature, I much doubt. Kent was hardy enough even to plant a withered tree; but the error was too glaring for imitation. Objects in every mode of composition should harmonize; and all we venture to assert, is, that these maladies are then only sources of beauty, either in the wild scenes of Nature or in artificial landscape, when they are the appendages of some particular mode of composition.

We have never planted a withered tree, as Kent is said to have done, but we have often manufactured one. Where

pleasure walks have been so confined by trees, that the romantic river, or the wide spread landscape, has been hidden from the view, instead of cutting open a formal breach in the wood, resembling the port-hole in a ship's side, or an embrasure in a wall, we have often found the advantage of leaving some tree most fit for our purpose, and breaking it rudely down with the hatchet into a picturesque form. By this means we have not unfrequently succeeded in forming very beautiful foregrounds to the pictures we created, and even the attempts of Nature to reproduce the shorn limbs, often caused very happy accidental effects.

The last and most beautiful of those diseases which Mr Lawson ascribes to trees, is moss. This, it is true, is one of Nature's minutiæ, and in painting, touches not the great parts, composition and effect. Nor is it of use in mere drawing. But in coloured landscape, it is surely a very beautiful object of imitation. The variety of mosses, the green, which tinges the trunk of the beech; the brimstone coloured and black, which stain the oak; and the yellow, which is frequently found on the elm and ash, are among the most beautiful of those tints which embellish the bark of trees.

I have often stood with admiration before an old forest oak, examining the various tints which have enriched its furrowed stem. The genuine bark of an oak is of an ash-colour, though it is difficult to distinguish any part of it from the mosses that overspread it; for no oak, I suppose, was ever without a greater or a less proportion of these picturesque appendages. The lower parts, about the roots, are often possessed by that green velvet moss, which in a still greater degree commonly occupies the bole of the beech; though the beauty and brilliancy of it lose much, when in decay. As the trunk rises, you see the brimstone colour taking possession in patches. Of this there are two principal kinds: a smooth sort, which spreads like a scurf over the bark; and a rougher sort, which hangs in little rich knots and fringes. I call it a brimstone hue, by way of general distinction: but it sometimes inclines to an olive; and sometimes to a light green. Intermixed with these mosses you often find a species perfectly white. Before I was acquainted with it, I have sometimes thought the tree white-washed.