'Oh well,' you say, 'these turrets and gables and things look all very well in pictures, but they would never do for our streets: we must build in some regular style, you know.' The same old error again, the same servile imitation of a vague something or other, which we call classic. Do you think the old German burghers built in any regular style? Not a bit of it. They built just what they wanted, in the most natural and plain-spoken manner. If they wanted a porch over the door, or a bay window at a certain corner, or a turret to enjoy some favorite view--they made them, put them just where they were needed. Convenience was everything, and precedent nothing. Is there not something about this individual originality, this perfect freedom of thought and expression, that might be adapted to express the American character? And if more pleasing, why cling to the effete and cumbrous tyrannies of a soulless classicism? Why crush out all symptoms of natural growth to make room for the unsightly exotic? Nature herself has made the law that beauty is _variety_. Monotony, though magnificent, will become irksome, but variety is an unceasing delight. Versailles, with its formal avenues of shorn foliage, and its geometrical lawns and terraces, may please you more at first sight than an English park, because the mind feels a sort of pride in being able to grasp such vast ideas at a glance. But you will find, upon a second or third visit, that the unnatural arrangement of the French pleasure grounds has something of staleness about it. Nature disdains such bondage. Louis XIV, it is said, grew weary of his splendid plaything, almost before it was finished. How different the English landscape garden, where graceful sweeps and irregular masses of foliage meet the eye with unlooked-for beauties at every turn! Well do we remember how, after a few days spent in viewing the grand dullness of the Bavarian capital, we looked wearily back to the delightful visit we made at Nuremberg, with its curious old streets and fountains: 'Quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint old town of art and song; Memories haunt thy pointed gables like the rooks that round them throng.' To claim the merit of variety for our streets is wrong, for they are not varied, but only incongruous. Their variety is rather that of an architectural museum than the result of any combination. We have styles enough, in all conscience, but none that will tolerate any other.