268 SKETCHES BY A PRACTISING ARCHITECT. 



draught upon his comforts, his house shall be suffi- 

 ciently exalted by decorative pride, if he will but 

 forego his superfluities of domestic luxury, his debi- 

 litating drinks, and a portion of his racing stud. 



To return to our more particular business with Sir 

 Anglo. Away go your columnar decorations, and 

 Parker's stucco is to take the place of Portland 

 stone. Still the general outline is left, and Palladian 

 taste has yet some opportunity in the exercise of an 

 admired proportion between ** solid and void " — in 

 that " beauty which originates in design, and is not 

 superinduced by ornament, and by that happy some- 

 thing between flat and prominent, which charms 

 both in front and profile,*' and of which Forsyth is 

 so justly enamoured. According, therefore, to the 

 reduced scheme, the works begin to rise in palpable 

 brick and mortar. Peculiar ideas oi convenience now 

 begin to shew themselves, as over-ruling, in Sir 

 Anglo's mind, where, before, they were subservient 

 to Italianized notions of taste. Alarming questions 

 are constantly being made, touching a positively 

 demanded accordance with all the usual habits of 

 the English builder — aye, of the heretofore despised 

 English builder ! He seriously hopes you have made 

 his windows " as high and as wide as his friend 

 Maxwell's, which are just within the tax law for 

 single lights :" — He fancies, from what he now sees 

 performing on the second floor level, (but which he 

 overlooked in the designs) that " you are thinking 

 of giving him those vile square windows that admit 

 such a paucity of light into the bed rooms of his 



friend Trollope's house built by that fellow ,"* 



In short, he expresses a score of the most fearfully 

 indigenous notions, and leaves you choking in the 

 consciousness, that such an issue of matters will be 

 expected as is totally incompatible with the prin- 

 ciples on which you have acted — principles, origin- 

 ating in a silly belief, that when Sir Anglo talked so 



* No matter, an eminent architect. 



