Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. Variety is most akin to the latter, simplicity to the former.

William Shenstone (1714–1763), an English poet and essayist, was also a noted improver of landscape gardens at his estate, the Leasowes, and he wrote frequently on taste and aesthetics. The remark belongs to his reflective, aphoristic prose on art and criticism, where he weighs how different aesthetic qualities—such as the “grand” and the “beautiful”—operate and how they can conflict in practice. In mid‑18th‑century discussions of taste, writers often distinguished sublimity or grandeur from beauty, and Shenstone’s observation fits that period’s effort to map the principles by which poetry, rhetoric, and design achieve their effects.

Shenstone argues that “grandeur” (the imposing, the vast, the elevated) and “beauty” (the pleasing, delicate, harmonious) tend to pull in different directions: intensifying one can blunt the other. He then links each quality to a compositional method. Variety—multiplicity of parts, changes, ornament, and detail—supports beauty by keeping the mind pleasantly engaged. Simplicity—few elements, broad masses, restraint—supports grandeur by preventing distraction and allowing scale or force to dominate. The point is not that one is better, but that artists and designers must choose and balance means according to the intended effect.