Your letter of 13th ulto. to John & Harry has interested and delighted me greatly. You have been most fortunate and in reading I said to myself constantly “that is just what I should think.” I do hope that you will write something for the public on the present state of the art and the conditions of its practice in Europe.

As you refer to Milner as one to whom Johnson’s statements cannot apply I will tell you that he particularly mentioned Milner. He said that Milner’s father had made a fortune by taking contracts to carry out his own plans, had established a great business to which his son succeeded and which he was pursuing in the same way, i.e. a thoroughly speculative, brokerish, shopkeeperish, way. I did not believe him but I could not avoid your thought that there must be too much of trade & too little of art in his great business. But it is a difficult question, and Morris’s success in combining art & commercial profit in a large scale is to be reflected upon. The important fact is that a master eye is needed in details of any gardening work for several years, as well as in the preparation of plans and specifications.

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I wrote advising you to see the villas on the Po and to which Howells refers. Talking with Walker yesterday he spoke of villas that he had visited and enjoyed at or near “Laquercia” (?) a short morning’s walk (perhaps 4 miles) N.E. of Viterbo, to which you go from Rome. I think that you want to get hints for gardening in dry, hot regions of our country from Italy, Spain & South of France. You do not it seems to me get much of value from the show villas to which you go as a matter of course. But I remember moderate places which struck me as delightful, and one or two that I cannot now specify I made my way into and faintly recall always when I think of what should be done in California, Colorado, New Mexico, or, really in Georgia/Florida. I speak of a month in all Italy more than thirty years ago when I had no more thought of being a landscape architect than of being a Cardinal. Yet my experience has been of much value to me.

Yours Very Truly