That one man likes a room in which three people form a crowd, and that
another prefers an apartment spacious as Exeter Hall, is a matter of
individual taste, with which the world has nothing whatever to do.
Your neighbour in the valley may like a cottage not larger than a
sugar-hogshead, with rats for company and beetles for bedfellows; your
friend on the hill-side may build himself an imaginary castle, with
armour for furniture, and antique weapons for ornaments;--with all
this you have no concern--no more than with his banker's book, or the
thoughts of his bosom: but should the one or the other, either by a
thing like a piggery, or an incongruous mass like a jail, destroy all
the beauty and mar all the effect of the scenery for miles round, far
beyond the precincts of his own small tenure--should he outrage all the
principles of taste, and violate every sentiment of landscape beauty,
by some poor and contemptible, or some pretentious and vulgar
edifice--then, do I say, you are really aggrieved; and against such a
man you have a just and equitable complaint, as one interfering with the
natural pleasures and just enjoyments to which, as a free citizen of a
free state, you have an indubitable, undeniable right.
That waving, undulating meadow, hemmed in with its dark woods, and
mirrored in the fair stream that flows peacefully beneath it, was never,
surely, intended to be disfigured with a square house like a salt-box,
and a verandah like a register-grate: the far-stretching line of yellow
coast that you see yonder, where the calm sea is sleeping, land locked
by those jutting headlands, was never meant to be pock marked with those
vile bathing lodges, with green baize draperies drying before them.
Was that bold and granite-sided mountain made thus to be hewed out into
parterres for polyanthuses, and stable-lanes for Cockneys' carmen?--or
is the margin of our glorious bay, the deep frame-work of the bright
picture, to be carved into little terraces, with some half-dozen slated
cabins, or a row of stiff-looking, Leeson-street-like houses, with brass
knockers and a balcony? Forbid it, heaven! We have a board of wide and
inconvenient streets, who watch over all the irregularities of municipal
architecture, and a man is no more permitted to violate the laws of good
taste, than he is suffered to transgress those of good morals. Why not
have a similar body to protect the fairer part of the created globe? Is
Pill-lane more sacred than Bray-head? Has Copper-alley stronger claims
than the Glen-of-the Downs? Is the Cross-poddle more classic ground than
Poolaphuca?
A NUT FOR A NEW COLONY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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