A plantation is certainly the best expedient for hiding the pales; but in some cases it will also hide more than is required. And in all cases, if a plantation surround a place in the manner commonly practised under the name of a belt, it becomes a boundary scarce less offensive than the pale itself. The mind feels a certain disgust under a sense of confinement in any situation, however beautiful; as Dr. Johnson has forcibly illustrated, in describing the feeling of Rasselas, in the happy valley of Abyssinia. 2. A second method of concealing a fence is, by making it of such light materials as to render it nearly invisible; such are fences made of slender iron and wire painted green. 3. A third method is, sinking the fence below the surface of the ground, by which means the view is not impeded, and the continuity of lawn is well preserved. Where this sunk fence or fosse is adopted, the deception ought to be complete; but this cannot be where grass and corn-lands are divided by such a fence: if it is used betwixt one lawn and another, the mind acquiesces in the fraud even after it is discovered, so long as the fence itself does not obtrude on the sight. We must therefore so dispose a fosse, or ha! ha! that we may look across it and not along it. For this reason a sunk fence must be straight and not curving, and it should be short, else the imaginary freedom is dearly bought by the actual confinement, since nothing is so difficult to pass as a deep sunk fence. 4. A fourth expedient I have occasionally adopted, and which (if I may use the expression) is a more bold deception than a sunk fence, viz., a light hurdle instead of paling; the one we are always used to consider as a fixed and immovable fence at the boundary of a park or lawn; the other only as an occasional division of one part from the other: it is a temporary inconvenience, and not a permanent confinement.
