



JOURNAL OF RURAL ART AND RURAL TASTE. 



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WIHERE are fashions in all things, and so far from underrating the importance of 

 ^ imitation as a means of improvement, we are inclined to value it for all it is worth. 

 Many a man who would never be led to make any progress in mental, moral, or social 

 culture, for the intrinsic value of these things in themselves, is induced to do so because 

 he finds others considering them essential. The powerful, original, inventive minds lead; 

 the merely imitative and dull are content to follow. The misfortune is, that in follow- 

 ing, they often lose the spirit, and pertinaciously adhering to the letter, they blunder 

 into errors, sometimes more ludicrous than those they seek to cure. 



We are led to these remarks by observing how, when the absurdity of an old idea 

 is pointed out, and it begins to be abandoned by those who think and act first in such 

 matters — those who think and act from some principle — it is often taken up and car- 

 ried to excess, by those who see or understand no principle at all, but merely adopt it 

 because it is the fashion to do so. 



An amusing example of this is the rage now in vogue in New- York, for painting all 

 dwellings of a dingy brown color — " Victoria brown," we believe the painters call it. 

 It so happened, that along with the building of Trinity Church, in New-York, some 

 ten years ago, sprung up quite a new and improved taste in architecture. This 

 grew partly out of the novelty of seeing, for the first time, a really good church built 

 of solid stone, the beautiful details of which were finely executed in the compa- 

 ratively soft sandstone used in that building, and also from the fact, made manifest 

 by the extensive use of that material, that the beauty resulting from enriched ar- 

 chitecture, a thing almost impossible in cold, hard granite, was not only possible, 

 but delightful in a more pliant material. Captivated by the use of a building materi- 

 which edifices no longer frowned in the sternness of gray rock, but smiled in the 

 ss of " freestone," granite and bricks were almost abandoned, and churches, 



May 1, 1852. 



No. V. 



