Since the art of Landscape Gardening requires the combination of certain portions of knowledge in so many different arts, it is no wonder that the professors of each should respectively suggest what is most obvious to their own experience; and thus the painter, the kitchen gardener, the engineer, the land agent, and the architect, will frequently propose expedients different from those which the landscape gardener may think proper to adopt. The difficulties which I have occasionally experienced from these contending interests, induced me to make a complete digest of each subject proposed to my consideration, affixing the reasons on which my opinion was founded, and stating the comparative advantages to the whole, of adopting or rejecting certain parts of any plan. To make my designs intelligible, I found that a mere map was insufficient; as being no more capable of conveying an idea of the landscape, than the ground-plan of a house does of its elevation. To remedy this deficiency, I delivered my opinions in writing, that they might not be misconceived or misrepresented; and I invented the peculiar kind of slides to my sketches, which are here imitated by the engraver. [Fig. 1.] Such drawings, to shew the proposed effects, can be useful but in a very few instances; yet I have often remarked, with some mortification, that it is the only part of my labours which the common observer has time or leisure to examine; although it is the least part of that perfection in the art, to which these hints and sketches will, I hope, contribute. I confess that the great object of my ambition is not merely to produce a book of pictures, but to furnish some hints for establishing the fact, that true taste in landscape gardening, as well as in all the other polite arts, is not an accidental effect, operating on the outward senses, but an appeal to the understanding, which is able to compare, to separate, and to combine, the various sources of pleasure derived from external objects, and to trace them to some pre-existing causes in the structure of the human mind*.
*["Where disposition, where decorum, where congruity, are concerned, -in short, wherever the best taste differs from the worst, I am convinced that the understanding operates, and nothing else."-Burke's Preface to Sublime and Beautiful. JCL].