468 



FORMATION OF RURAL TASTE. 



him a succession of seed-time and harvest ; 

 but of hunting, fishing and marauding. He 

 is here to-day, and is gone to-morrow. He 

 has no local habitation ; and the arrange- 

 ments of his domicil correspond with his 

 social state. 



Advancing from savage to barbarous, 

 and from barbarous to civilized society, 

 the operation of this law is equally mani- 

 fest. If the state of society be such that 

 every house must be a castle, will not this 

 fact give character to its architectural de- 

 signs ? What idea is expressed by the 

 battlsment, the turret, the castellated wall, 

 but that of security from aggression, of pro- 

 tection from violence, of stately barons 

 clad in armor, and dependent vassals seek- 

 ing a refuge from lawless hands in the 

 shadow of the citadel ? What is picturesque 

 or poetical in the mouldering wall, with its 

 ivy drapery, but that it tells of the days of 

 chivahy, when knight-errantry did homage 

 to beauty? Wherefore sang Ossian not of 

 the softly resplendent glories, the mild 

 beauties of the landscape 1 His muse, true 

 to the inspiration of the spirit of his age, 

 has chronicled not these, but the unriaval- 

 led prowess, the high-souled daring of his 

 hero, age, and his heroine likewise ; for the 

 spirit of the age allowed of no beauty that 

 was not heroic. To a modern beauty, 

 could the utmost stretch of his imagination 

 have conceived the idea of such a being, in 

 all the potency of rouge, bustle and bloom, 

 soft charms and terrifRc fainting fits, his 

 muse would have assigned a place with 

 harlequins and other burlesques upon hu- 

 manity. 



Hence, the taste of a people is their sense 

 of the fitness and adaptation of any particu- 

 lar work of art. It is the embodiment of 

 their artistic designs ; and setting in judg- 

 ment upon any particular style, will approve 

 or condemn, accordingly as it approaches 



or varies from its own standard. We ad- 

 mire the creations of the painter and the 

 poet, not so much for their beauty as for 

 their truth, and the very hideousness of 

 the artist's production is often it.< real point 

 of interest. So truly have past ages fore- 

 shadowed national taste, in their works of 

 art, that in every sketch, however rude and 

 imperfect, if truthful, the practiced eye de- 

 tects those lineaments which mark its lo- 

 cality and date, with as much precision as 

 the comparative anatomist determines the 

 size, habits, disposition, and even the native 

 country of an animal, by the inspection of 

 a single bone. 



American rural taste being in its nascent 

 state, is now undergoing the moulding pro- 

 cess ; and it is amusing and sometimes lu- 

 dicrous to see some of the specimens of its 

 apprenticeship. I will not aver that the 

 marble column, with its sculptured capital, 

 has ever actually found its way into the 

 wigwam, and become part alW parcel of it; 

 but I must be permitted to say, that some 

 of our specimens of style present to the eye 

 of the beholder a commingling of incon- 

 gruities almost as absurd. They often re- 

 mind me of a picture a friend once de- 

 scribed to me, designed to represent the 

 departure of the prodigal son from the pa- 

 ternal mansion The interior of the apart- 

 ment discovered the father in bag-wig, 

 small-clothes, and embroidered collar, after 

 the manner of the old English gentleman, 

 drawing from an escritoir, of modern con- 

 struction, the son's portion ; the son dressed 

 in the style of an exquisite, of the present 

 day, with a coach and four standing at the 

 door ; while, in the back ground, the Con- 

 stitution was pouring her broadsides into 

 the Gurriere, a thousand years before the 

 invention of gunpowder! Should the pro- 

 duction of this prince of artists outlive 

 those of a Rafael or a Michael Angeloij 



