CORRUGATED IRON. 
i‘3 
in many cases enhance or accentuate. The varied greenisli 
grey tints of oak palings or rough hewn wood fences of all sorts, 
always harmonise perfectly with their surroundings — tree trunks, 
foliage, masonry, or whatever else they may be ; whereas these 
formal iron fences, though no doubt useful for protecting a 
growing hedge, always tend to destroy that natural rustic 
simplicity which is perhaps the principal charm of the country. 
This iron work has nothing in common with the surrounding 
trees and hedges, but suggests town ways and usages ; and one 
can hardly help feeling that it is entirely out of keeping with 
blooming cottage gardens, wayside meadows, and grazing cows. 
Fences made of wood, on the contrary, seem thoroughly to 
belong to such scenes, and like many old cottages, barns and 
other buildings, acquire in time the appearance of having grown 
up there in company with the neighbouring trees. They are as 
it were a mere adaptation of the surrounding stems and branches 
to a particular purpose. 
But, ugly and objectionable as iron fences certainly are, they 
are quite insignificant as destroyers of beauty, when compared 
with the great dreary expanses of cold unsympathetic metal 
which now thrust themselves on our unwilling gaze wherever 
we go ; and when one sees these glaring sheets of iron replacing 
in all directions the warm ruddy hues of tiles, or the exquisite 
greys of reed and straw thatch (at once the most beautiful and 
most comfortable of all roof coverings), one shrinks from 
imagining what the appearance of the country must be a genera- 
tion or two hence. 
That sweet homely character which once belonged to our 
English scenery is fast disappearing. We have no need to go 
so far back as the time of Gainsborough or Constable for a 
standard of comparison ; the process of deterioration is only too 
apparent, and is everywhere forced upon our notice. How often 
the contemplation of some familiar spot costs us a severe pang 
when we compare its present aspect with that it used to bear 
even within our own recollection. Noble trees which have out- 
lived many generations of men have been ruthlessly felled, 
sometimes whole rows at a time, and roadside hedges are kept 
continually clipped, and thus deprived of their natural beauty 
and variety. The few trees now allowed to grow beside the 
highways are so cruelly mutilated and disfigured, that their 
poor distorted forms are apt rather to excite feelings of pity and 
indignation than of pleasure, and the wayfarer toiling along the 
hot dusty roads looks in vain for the welcome shade of thick 
foliage ; in short, too often the beauty of the country is sacrificed 
for the sake of the roads. 
Rows of houses too, of supreme ugliness, presenting a curious 
combination of meanness and ostentation, the production of the 
speculative builder, spring up like mushrooms in place of the 
picturesque and substantial farmhouses and cottages of a former 
period. 
