What Will He Do with It? — Volume 07Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
General
What Will He Do with It? — Volume 07
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
English fiction -- 19th century
Eleven o'clock, A.M., Samuel Adolphus Poole, Esq., is in his parlour,
--the house one of those new dwellings which yearly spring up north of
the Regent's Park,--dwellings that, attesting the eccentricity of the
national character, task the fancy of the architect and the gravity of
the beholder--each tenement so tortured into contrast with the other,
that, on one little rood of ground, all ages seemed blended, and all
races encamped. No. 1 is an Egyptian tomb!--Pharaohs may repose there!
No. 2 is a Swiss chalet--William Tell may be shooting in its garden! Lo!
the severity of Doric columns--Sparta is before you! Behold that Gothic
porch--you are rapt to the Norman days! Ha! those Elizabethan mullions--
Sidney and Raleigh, rise again! Ho! the trellises of China--come forth,
Confucius, and Commissioner Yeh! Passing a few paces, we are in the land
of the Zegri and Abencerrage:
'Land of the dark-eyed maid and dusky Moor.'
Mr. Poole's house is called Alhambra Villa! Moorish verandahs--plate-
glass windows, with cusped heads and mahogany sashes--a garden behind,
a smaller one in front--stairs ascending to the doorway under a Saracenic
portico, between two pedestalled lions that resemble poodles--the whole
new and lustrous--in semblance stone, in substance stucco-cracks in the
stucco denoting "settlements." But the house being let for ninety-nine
years--relet again on a running lease of seven, fourteen, and twenty-one-
the builder is not answerable for duration, nor the original lessee for
repairs. Take it altogether, than Alhambra Villa masonry could devise no
better type of modern taste and metropolitan speculation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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