only its adaptation to the situation and climate in which it has arisen,
but its strong similarity to, and connection with, the prevailing turn
of mind by which the nation who first employed it is distinguished.

3. I consider the task I have imposed upon myself the more necessary,
because this department of the science, perhaps regarded by some who
have no ideas beyond stone and mortar as chimerical, and by others who
think nothing necessary but truth and proportion as useless, is at a
miserably low ebb in England. And what is the consequence? We have
Corinthian columns placed beside pilasters of no order at all,
surmounted by monstrosified pepper-boxes, Gothic in form and Grecian in
detail, in a building nominally and peculiarly "National"; we have Swiss
cottages, falsely and calumniously so entitled, dropped in the
brick-fields round the metropolis; and we have staring square-windowed,
flat-roofed gentlemen's seats, of the lath and plaster,
mock-magnificent, Regent's Park description, rising on the woody
promontories of Derwentwater.

4. How deeply is it to be regretted, how much is it to be wondered at,
that, in a country whose school of painting, though degraded by its
system of meretricious coloring, and disgraced by hosts of would-be
imitators of inimitable individuals, is yet raised by the distinguished
talent of those individuals to a place of well-deserved honor; and the
studios of whose sculptors are filled with designs of the most pure
simplicity, and most perfect animation; the school of architecture
should be so miserably debased!

5. There are, however, many reasons for a fact so lamentable. In the
first place, the patrons of architecture (I am speaking of all classes
of buildings, from the lowest to the highest), are a more numerous and