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40 who repeats a striking note of colour in diminuendo in the distance, so as to heighten its telling qualities in the foreground. The Japanese says, just as our painters do, that the important parts are the back- and fore-grounds, and that the middle distances can take care of themselves.

But, however rigid garden rules may appear, there is always in them a delightful elasticity in their application, a really wonderful individuality in the carrying out of them. Faces have each a nose, a pair of eyes, and a mouth, hair, ears, teeth, but who shall say that their only difference occurs in the loss of one of these features? Let no man chafe at the laws, then, for without laws there is licence, ugliness, death, instead of re-birth in decay. Nature, who seems so lawless, so untrammelled, is the most relentless mistress man can have. But if she is severe, she is tender; if cruel, she is altogether lovely, and so, in their bending to her rules, are Japanese gardens.

Maurice Hewlett makes one of his characters say somewhere that “Horticulture is, next to music, the most sensitive of the fine arts. Properly allied to Architecture, garden making is as near as a man may get to the Divine functions.”

And the Japanese are very near!