THE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 
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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, w r hich 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 fatai 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 tbe 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 sec 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 tbe 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. 
