AVHEELER'S RURAL HOMES. 



men, and, towering above all, " the great house of the village, with its noble woods, and 

 lawns," &c. The plain reading of this is, simply an Established Church, a rural peasant- 

 ry, and a nobleman's seat; instead of the republican features of one of our prettiest coun- 

 try villages— say a New-England village — with its numerous places of worship, its broad 

 avenues of Elms, overshadowing no single great man's house, but many homes, marked 

 by that general diffusion of comfort, independence, and growing taste, which is the clia- 

 racteristic feature of our model villages in this country. 



While we owe to foreign architects much that is beautiful and valuable in our public and 

 private edifices in this country, and gladly acknowledge the debt, where it is due to real 

 talent and integrity, we have no toleration of pseudo-architects from abroad, who leave 

 home with too small a smattering of professional knowledge to ensure success at home, 

 and after three or four years of practice in this country — marked by constant proofs of 

 incapacity to understand our people or their wants, undertake to direct the popular taste, 

 as if they were thoroughly familiar with our social habits and institutions. Mr. Wheeler 

 is one of this class. His book would lead us to suppose him the most accomplished and 

 most conscientious man in his profession, and, if the reader were an entire stranger, also 

 to believe the writer to be a new world citizen, whose native talents had been developed 

 by large culture in the old world; while in fact, his professional practice has, to our own 

 knowledge,* been such as to leave an impression most unfavorable to the reputation of an 

 architect, every where that he has deigned to put into substantial shape any of the "techni- 

 calities and theories" that he has " mastered" on the other side of the water. 



" I have mentally headed every page" — says Mr. Wheeler in his preface, " with a 

 sentence suggested as a matin and even song to every architect and amateur — Mr. Ran- 

 kin's great maxim, " Until common sense finds its way into architecture, there can bebut 

 little hope for it." 



W hat will our readers say to a man who writes thus, and then puts stained glass into 

 the windows of a stable of a gentleman's country seat! And yet this brilliant triumph 

 of common sense is the offspring of Mr. Wheeler's taste and talents in a case where he 

 had carte blanche and entire control, in a country seat not a thousand miles from New- 

 York. 



While we find much that is instructive and agreeable in this volume of Rural Homes, 

 we must caution our readers that there is little that is -(^mertcan about the work, and say 

 in the author's own words, applied to others — they are " sweetly pretty on paper — but 

 dear friends, take care that you thoroughly satisfy yourselves that you can make [Ameri- 

 can] homes of them, before you commit yourselves to a choice you may afterwards repent. " 



* The fact, that in former works we have published one or two of Mr. Wheeler's designs, must be taken as proof 

 that further acquaintance with the architect and his works, have forced us to abandon our earlier impressions. 



