THE DESECRATION OF SCENERY.
(To THE ED/TOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."] S,—Your vigorous treatment • of the above topic in the Spectator of August 18th gave great satisfaction; I am sure, to many lovers of Nature, both English and American. For one 1 want to thank you most heartily, and to express the earnest hope that such protests will result in something more substantial than complaint in the public prints. It Certainly seems a case wherea practical application of the boycott is legitimate and in order. I write out of a sense of disappoint- ment which some years have not effaced. Making a first Visit to England in 1895, I fondly hoped to find relief , from that torturing desecration of natural-sceneryWhich had long made me ashamed of my own country for its indiscriminate devotion to the advertising- mania, regardless of all sense of beauty or propriety. Landing at Liverpool, and taking an early train for London, I. was soon amid those summer charms of English rural landscape with which English liters- tire has made us all so familiar. It was indeed the "Motherland," and I felt at home.. But no sooner- had I fairly surrendered myself to the spell of my surroundings, than away across the spreading turf, against a background of the lovely hedges, there smote upon my eye the vision of two upright poles bearing a broad board inscribed with the ghastly legend : "Take • "I It was "home again" With a vengeance. The spell was broken, and could not be wholly recovered. During all my stay I was continually reminded that Britain and America are constantly increasing the binds that show their kinship and bind them together. I am bound to say, however, that I saw nothing in England quite So bad as the blood-curdling form of advertisement which appeared about that time at San Francisco; where a chimney-sweeping concern spread its announcement. in enor- Mona letters burnt with quicklime in the grass neiir the summit of oneof the "Twin Peaks" on the west side of the city, Where for at least a year it could not be obliterated, but stared in the face of both citixen and, tourist, to the shame of the fernier and the disgust of all if that was not d case for the strongest kind of -boycott, no Severer penalty being avail- able, then there never was one.—I am, Sir, &c., • M. W. Hartford, Conn.,
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