THE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 



311 



of taste worthy of being copied at the present time. Excess in 

 this department is the less dangerous, because architectural forms 

 of all kinds suggest wealth and ease ; and it is one of the tendencies 

 of wealth to multiply these sources of pleasure, and with an 

 unsparing hand heap up on all sides the evidences of an enthusiasm 

 in the refining arts. Indeed, when we meet with examples of excessive 

 embellishment, it is usually of the strictly rustic class, which may 

 certainly be most easily overdone ; and an excess of rustic work any- 

 where betrays more of eccentricity and littleness than of a cultivated 

 mind. 



The first and fatal objection to elaborate ornamentation in gardens 

 arises out of the fashion in which the houses themselves are built ; 

 for the garden begins at the garden door, the house is an integral 

 portion of the whole scene, and except the princely mansions that 

 melt by degrees into lawns and shrubberies, through the medium of 

 terraces and gay parterres, the spectacle out of doors is ruined by 

 the fact that there we have but a " back view of the premises." 



Whatever builders may say about usage, and expense, and doing 

 as their fathers did before them, it must be admitted that a funda- 

 mental principle of taste is violated when we give our houses 

 handsome frontages to the public, and reserve for our own daily 

 •contemplation from the garden nothing but bare walls and plain 

 windows, and oblique chimneys rising from a basement of ugliness. 

 "Why should the stranger see a fair exterior, and we ourselves in our 

 privacy and home life, have to stare perpetually at outhouses, pantries, 

 shapeless lobbies, and kitchen windows ? Turn the house round 

 then, and expose our domestic offices with the odour of our daily 

 dinner to the streets ? No ; — let the rear wall and attached offices 

 have as much symmetry as the portico, and flight of steps, and 

 handsome windows in the front. It is as bad as for a man to appear 

 in society with a showy vest and faultless collar, but with soiled 

 fustian at his back, because, forsooth, you are not expected to address 

 him from behind, or because " a front view of the elephant " is all 

 that is seemly. 



Screens. — Where architectural beauty is fully developed, as it 



is in many of the mansions of our nobility and landed gentry, the 

 construction of terraces and geometric gardens may be definitely 



October. 



