itself, so many geological formations, each giving a peculiar character to the country which it composes, that there is hardly a district five miles broad, which preserves the same features of landscape through its whole width.[1] If, for example, six foreigners were to land severally at Glasgow, at Aberystwith, at Falmouth, at Brighton, at Yarmouth and at Newcastle, and to confine their investigations to the country within twenty miles of them, what different impressions would they receive of British landscape! If, therefore, there be as many forms of edifice as there are peculiarities of situation, we can have no national style; and, if we abandon the idea of a correspondence with situation, we lose the only criterion capable of forming a national style.[2]
- ↑ Length is another thing: we might divide England into strips of country, running southwest and northeast, which would be composed of the same rock, and, therefore, would present the same character throughout the whole of their length. Almost all our great roads cut these transversely, and, therefore, seldom remain, for ten miles together on the same beds.
- ↑ It is thus that we find the most perfect schools of architecture have arisen in districts whose character is unchanging. Looking to Egypt first, we find a climate inducing a perpetual state of heavy feverish excitement, fostered by great magnificence of natural phenomena, and increased by the general custom of exposing the head continually to the the sun (Herod. Thalia, xii.); so that, as in a dreaming fever, we imagine distorted creatures and countenances moving and living in the quiet objects of the chamber. The Egyptian endowed all existence with distorted animation; turned dogs into deities, and leeks into lightning-darters; then gradually invested the blank granite with sculptured mystery, designed in superstition, and adored in disease; and then such masses of architecture arose as, in delirium, we feel crushing down upon us with eternal weight, and see extending far into the
