button to main menu  Description of Sixty Studies, pp.32-33
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page 32:-
time displayed in the felling of their woods and coppices, and with a view to benefit those proprietors, he has advised them to propogate trees of various sorts, and in such places as are likely to produce ultimately the greatest quantity of benefit and beauty; to encourage all favourites, particularly those in interesting situations, by that kind of attention that will produce a rapid growth; to leave on every estate at least as many trees as acres that are tolerably advanced towards a state of maturity, always taking care to have a succession of younger plants, that they may be enabled to enrich themselves while they are annually adding to the celebrity of their possessions; thus ensuring utility and beauty to go hand in hand; for every man knows, at least every man of taste knows, that in all frequented vallies, particularly such as are not only environed by high mountains, but the bot-
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[bot]toms of which are of uneven surfaces, that land will sell for most money which is the most beautifully wooded.
Grasmere is beautiful, but infinitely less so than it would be if graced by groups and single forest trees of a large growth, not only in the vallies but on the sides of the mountains. - Grasmere is beautiful, but that beauty depends, however extraordinary it may appear, on the multitude of its land owners, for were Grasmere the property of one person, he might exterminate the wood in a spring; but fifty men are seldom in one humour, and the beauty of Grasmere, as far as depends on its woods, is the effect of accident, not of design.
But chance can never do more than intention, unless that intention be under the influence of a false taste; the genius of this country imperiously demands a true taste, or no taste a tall (sic),
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