I am aware of the common objection to all efforts that may be deemed deceptions; but it is the business of taste, in all the polite arts, to avail itself of stratagems, by which the imagination may be deceived. The images of poetry and of painting are then most interesting, when they seduce the mind to believe their fictions; and, in landscape gardening, everything may be called a deception by which we endeavour to conceal the agency of art, and make our works appear the sole product of nature. The most common attempts to improve may, indeed, be called deceptions: we plant a hill, to make it appear higher than it is; we open the banks of a brook, to give it the appearance of a river; or stop its current, to produce an expanse of surface; we sink the fence betwixt one lawn and another, to give imaginary extent, without inconvenience or confinement; and every piece of artificial water, whether it take the shape of a lake, a river, or a pool, must look natural, or it will fail to be agreeable. Nor is the imagination so fastidious as to take offence at any well supported deception, even after the want of reality is discovered. When we are interested at a tragedy, we do not inquire whence the characters are copied: on the contrary, we forget that we see a Garrick or a Siddons, and join in the sorrows of a Belvidere or a Beverley, though we know that no such persons ever existed: it is enough, if so much as we are shewn of the character appears to be a just resemblance of nature. In the same manner, the magnificent water at Blenheim strikes with wonder and delight, while we neither see its beginning nor end; and we do not view it with less pleasure after we are told, that it was not originally a natural lake, but that Mr. Brown, stopping the current of a small river, collected this vast body of water into the beautiful shape we now admire.
