Another cause to be noticed is, the peculiar independence of the Englishman's disposition; a feeling which prompts him to suit his own humour, rather than fall in with the prevailing cast of social sentiment, or of natural beauty and expression; and which, therefore, there being much obstinate originality in his mind, produces strange varieties of dwelling, frequently rendered still more preposterous by his love of display; a love universally felt in England, and often absurdly indulged. Wealth is worshipped in France, as the means of purchasing pleasure; in Italy, as an instrument of power; in England, as the means "of showing off." It would be a very great sacrifice indeed, in an Englishman of the average stamp, to put his villa out of the way, where nobody would ever see it, or think of him: it is his ambition to hear every one exclaiming, "What a pretty place! whose can it be?"
blackness above; huge and shapeless colnmns of colossal life; immense and immeasurable avenues of mountain stone. This was a perfect, that is, a marked, enduring, and decided school of architecture, induced by an unchanging and peculiar character of climate. Then, in the purer air, and among the more refined energies of Greece, architecture rose into a more studied beauty, equally perfect in its school, because fostered in a district not 50 miles square, and in its dependent isles and colonies, all of which were under the same air, and partook of the same features of landscape. In Rome, it became less perfect, because more imitative than indigenous, and corrupted by the travelling, and conquering, and stealing ambition of the Roman; yet still a school of architecture, because the whole of Italy presented the same peculiarities of scene. So with the Spanish and Moresco schools, and many others; passing over the Gothic, which, though we hope hereafter to show it to be no exception to the rule, involves too many complicated questions to be now brought forward as a proof of it.
