DEBIVATION OF GREEK AND ROMAN STYLES. 423 



landscape ; and the one set of ideas tends to banish the 

 other. 



Pursuing the train of thought, sundry illustrative facts 

 came to ray mind. I remembered that a castle, which is 

 more irregular in outline than any other kind of building, 

 pleases us most when seated amid crags and precipices : 

 while a castle on a plain seems an incongruity. The partly - 

 regular and partly-irregular forms of our old farm-houses, 

 and our gabled gothic manors and abbeys, appear quite in 

 harmony with an undulating, wooded country. In towns 

 we prefer symmetrical architecture ; and in towns it pro- 

 duces in us no feeling of incongruity, because all surround- 

 ing things — men, horses, vehicles — are symmetrical also. 



And here I was reminded of a notion that has frequent- 

 ly recurred to me ; namely, that there is some relationship 

 between the several kinds of architecture and the several 

 classes of natural objects. Buildings in the Greek and 

 Roman styles seem, in virtue of their symmetry, to take 

 their type from animal life. In the partly-irregular Gothic, 

 ideas derived from the vegetable world appear to predomi- 

 nate. And wholly irregular buildings, such as castles, may 

 be considered as having inorganic forms for their basis. 



Whimsical as this speculation looks at first sight, it is 

 countenanced by numerous facts. The connexion between 

 symmetrical architecture and animal forms, may be inferred 

 from the kind of symmetry we expect, and are satisfied 

 with, in regular buildings. Thus in a Greek temple we re- 

 quire that the front shall be symmetrical in itself, and that 

 the two flanks shall be alike ; but we do not look for uni- 

 formity between the flanks and the front, nor between the 

 front and the back. The identity of this symmetry with 

 that found in animals is obvious. Again, why is it that a 

 building making any pretension to symmetry displeases us 

 if not quite symmetrical ? Probably the reply will be-— 

 Because we see that the designer's idea is not fully carried 



