With regard to natural scenery, though his observation of it was always keen, he delighted in what was rich and beautiful, rather than in the highest forms of grandeur. The love of mountain scenery was not then a fashion, which few, even in a Journal, would dare to disregard. His admiration of it was blended with the notion of something strange and almost grotesque in it. He speaks of it as exhibiting “the freaks and outrageous effects of Nature” in its wilder features, and the beauties of an Alpine pass seemed to him to present something “appalling,” calculated to excite a kind of awe, too oppressive for genuine admiration. He delighted more in the Apennines, rising in mountains of equal height “like the waves of the sea,” and disclosing in their lateral valleys scenes of quiet beauty and richness, or in the scenery of the Saronic Gulf, with its bright colour and picturesque variety. Colour, indeed, at this time, seems to have impressed him more than form: sunsets, or moonlight effects, and the contrasts of white cities with the verdure surrounding them, are constant themes of notice and admiration. He cared for what was bright and beautiful more than for any sombre and awful grandeur; and he was always master of his impressions rather than overmastered by them. His examination of buildings was always comprehensive, and his criticisms, even from the first, audaciously defiant of all fashion and authority.[4] In entering a town he always estimates its general effect before proceeding to details; and his impressions seem often divided between an artistic love of the picturesque and a determined architectural preference for regularity. In proceeding to greater particularity, no buildings came amiss to him. Besides the churches and palaces, which have a prescriptive right to precedence, he seems to have had a special taste for two most opposite specimens of architectural effect. Cemeteries, on the one hand, always attracted his notice, both as to their arrangement and their accompanying buildings, and in their case he had a strong dislike of over-embellishment. The sombre solemnity of a Turkish burial-ground was his ideal. The same taste which attached brightness and cheerfulness in buildings that ministered to life, inclined to solemnity and sadness in all that suggested the idea of death. On the other hand, theatres greatly interested him at all times, from the Scala at Milan to the little theatres of Italian country towns. He thought that they gave a grand opportunity for architectural effect, which was generally frittered away. And his note-books abound in plans and criticisms of existing buildings, and ideas as to their best theoretical construction. It was curious enough that a theatre was almost the only kind of public building which it never fell to his lot to execute.