138 AN AMERICAN FARMER IN ENGLAND. 



Yet the simple beauty of proportion and the breadth of light 

 and shade, in that little unimportant space, I did feel truly and 

 spontaneously. 



From all the little, but not unloving, study that I was able 

 to give the Old- World architecture, my advice to all building- 

 committee gentlemen of no more cultivated taste than my 

 own, (that to such these crude thoughts may give hints of 

 value, is my apology for printing them,) would be, Stick to 

 simplicity. The grand effect of architecture must be from form 

 and proportion. Favour designs, therefore, which, in their 

 grand outlines, are at once satisfactory ; then beware of en 

 feebling their strong features by childish ornaments and baby- 

 house appendages. Simplicity of form is especially neces 

 sary to any thing like dignity in an edifice of moderate size. 

 There is a church in New York, a cathedral in cabinet size, 

 that one could hardly look at without being reminded of a 

 grand dinner confectionary. The smallest parish churches of 

 the old Saxon architecture, with thick, rude, unchiselled walls, 

 strong enough to have needed no buttresses, and therefore 

 having none a low square tower or belfry, with flat lead, 

 roof, and a very few irregularly-placed, deep, round-arched 

 windows and portals, I have found far more inspiring of the 

 solemnity of humility which should accompany the formal 

 worship of the Almighty, than most of the very large churches 

 that have been built with the greater wealth and more finical 

 taste of later generations. 



