a solitary animal here and there looking as if it were lost, that I did not think it was for all the world like Hounslow Heath, thinly sprinkled over with bushes and highwaymen.”
“Sir,” said Mr Milestone, “you will have the goodness to make a distinction between the picturesque and the beautiful.”
“Will I?” said Sir Patrick, “och! but I won't. For what is beautiful? That what pleases the eye. And what pleases the eye? Tints variously broken and blended. Now, tints variously broken and blended constitute the picturesque.”
“Allow me,” said Mr Gall. “I distinguish the picturesque and the beautiful, and I add to them, in the laying out of grounds, a third and distinct character, which I call unexpectedness.”
“Pray, sir,” said Mr Milestone, [“by what name do you distinguish this character, when a person walks round the grounds for the second time?”[4.2]]
Mr Gall bit his lips, and inwardly vowed to revenge himself on Milestone, by cutting up his next publication.
A long controversy now ensued concerning the picturesque and the beautiful, highly edifying to Squire Headlong.
The three philosophers stopped, as they wound round a projecting point of rock, to contemplate a little boat which was gliding over the tranquil surface of the lake below.
“The blessings of civilisation,” said Mr Foster, “extend themselves to the meanest individuals of the community. That boatman, singing as he sails along, is, I have no doubt, a very happy, and, comparatively to the men of his class some centuries back, a very enlightened and intelligent man.”
“As a partisan of the system of the moral perfectibility of the human race,” said Mr Escot,—who was always for considering things on a large scale, and whose thoughts immediately wandered from the lake to the ocean, from the little boat to a ship of the line,—“you will probably be able to point out to me the degree of improvement that you suppose to have taken place in the character of a sailor, from the days when Jason sailed through the Cyanean Symplegades, or Noah moored his ark on the summit of Ararat.”