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in all sorts of buildings, erected for every possible purpose, and in narrow city lanes, and broad streets of country towns. It seems

to be easily attained, and quite as easily lost; and it is of such value in our eyes, that it endears a home to us, and even raises a house in its market value.

It will be noticed that the designers of old allowed more space to the streets of a country town than to those of a walled city. The land which was enclosed was more secure and valuable; and consequently it was more closely packed with houses. In some streets the houses approach so closely that an ordinary man can almost touch each dwelling, as at Shrewsbury and Newark; and in some parts of Chester there are singularly narrow streets. The Shambles at York are a very good example of an ancient street that has undergone little alteration; and the great central tower of the Cathedral, rising in a vast pale grey at the farthest end, has a very noble appearance. The house on the left, with projecting stories, is of high antiquity. Stories were built to project, in order to make more of the land on which the houses were crowded together.

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In Frankfort, and in some of the Continental towns, the dwellings run up to a great height, and are richly carved on the front with armorial bearings and historical scenes. They resemble the old houses that we occasionally find on the north side of St. Paul's, but that the latter want the rich carvings which we find so profusely on the Continent. They are, however, in many instances exceedingly picturesque, and, as before said, the word picturesque is of so undefined a character that it would be well to consider its meaning. Every one, as Mr. Petit has observed, has some notion of what he means by it himself, if even his own ideas may differ in some respect from those of his neighbours. What may be called restoring' architects have no idea, as a rule, of what the word means; they see what they call the excrescences of ages on a building of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, and they strike away the additions of the Tudor period and the Stuart, which are so dear to an artist, and add new work to correspond with the old. The old is then scraped to correspond with the new, and the result is a building that looks as if it had only been finished within the current year. This is, unhappily for the lovers of the picturesque, the crowning triumph of a church restorer. Bidston Church, for example, in Cheshire, was generally regarded as among the most picturesque little relics in all England; but some years ago it was considered to stand in need of repairs, which could have been easily made, and the venerable quaint structure, in the middle of a singularly old village, preserved; but it was

VOL. XLIII, NO. CLXX.

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decided to demolish it, and build a totally new one on a new pattern; this is the work that is most congenial to a 'restorer.' the eye It is not said in blame to any one; but as a matter of fact, for the picturesque with all concerned was, in this case, entirely wanting. In a similar spirit, the remark was recently made to me, from a quarter where I should hardly have expected it, that Chester stood in need of remodelling. I was walking with a friend on the ancient walls that environ the city, and we were noticing how pleasantly it rose from the Dee, when my companion remarked that it was a shame to see such a site so spoiled; and said that if the old streets were pulled down, and new broad ones built, running down towards the river with cross ones at right angles, then a really fine city might stand in its place.

Plate-glass and patent brick were his notions of delight, and had for him more attractions than the projecting gables and the quaint rows and casemented mullion windows of our forefathers; and yet this was not on the score of utility, because I easily explained to him that, for convenience, the city as it stood was much more suitable for the wants of a country town; but an even row of new shops was, to his eye, as superior in comeliness, according to his words, as a new coat is to a threadbare tattered suit. Again, I knew an architect who had always practised in the Scottish-Greek style of Edinburgh; and though his experience in that was very great indeed, he was at a loss when required to build a Gothic church. He believed that irregularity and confusion were necessary for picturesqueness, and accordingly, when required to design one, he put buttresses at irregular distances, and windows with square heads, and pointed heads, and all sorts of widths ranged side by side-and the result was a grotesque failure. The very essence of beauty and picturesqueness is harmony. An old building,' says Mr. Petit, 'is not necessarily picturesque, but it is more likely to be so than a new one; first, because it is a work of art that has long been left in the hands of nature, whose marks are impressed upon it in various tints which art could not imitate, and in changes of surface and texture that denote the lapse of time; and next, because it brings together the present and the past: for even if there is no modern work at hand to remind us that it belongs to an age different from our own, still we feel that it does so, and the appreciation of picturesqueness as well as of beauty is an operation of the mind as well as of the bodily sense. Still, the presence of objects more nearly approaching our own period adds much to picturesqueness;' and Mr. Petit adds with great truth, that the figures in a picture of an old building should never be made to imitate the costume of the period

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that it was built in, if picturesqueness be the object sought after. As an illustration of this, I may instance that I have just returned from a visit to some farm buildings in Cheshire, which once formed part of an Abbey. The refectory was filled with hay and straw, and wagons lay in front of an Abbot's private chapel-windowless, it is true, though the door and roof were perfect. A few labourers in the costume of the nineteenth century, with hayforks over their shoulders, had just come in from the fields, and were going into the remains that had been converted into a dwelling.

Now let any one picture this to himself, adapting it to any abbey he may have in his mind, and then suppose the building painted in its original form, and peopled with Benedictine monks. How infinitely the present state of the abbey surpasses, for the purposes of an artist, the old one! There is nothing, of course, incongruous in it, for that would be fatal to picturesqueness, which demands harmony.

Nothing can be in worse taste than a row of Gothic windows, even if they are the same in outline, with different tracery in their designs. Merton College chapel at Oxford would not be so bad if the best of the windows (and they are fairly good) were the type of all; but as it is, the effect of the building-which, however, has other sins to answer for-is most unpleasing. In a word, picturesqueness consists in uniformity and variety mingled together. We see it to perfection in many Continental towns that have not been much altered; and if we tried to get at the secrets of the designers of the buildings, I believe it would be found to consist in this: Each builder has had his own scheme, and fitted his work as well as he could to his neighbour's work; a harmony was thus kept throughout; nobody gave up his own individual requirements to make a window correspond with one in the next house, but he seemed to have a desire to be as neighbourly as possible in his design. Hence arose that pleasing mingling of uniformity and variety which has been insisted on as the soul of picturesqueness. Often the photograph of a landscape is so exactly suited to these conditions, that one may almost say that no change could be suggested for the better. The picture is in itself complete. If, however, a cottage or a row of cottages is introduced, it is wonderful how easily the landscape is marred; nor does it require much skill to destroy all the prospect; an ordinary builder or village wheelwright is generally quite equal to the occasion. The new edifice approaches the limit of the road allowed by the turnpike trust, and at once, as if by glamour, the ancient church, with its lych-gate and yews, disappears, and can only be seen after the

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new brick building is passed by. The beautiful group we remember of old is no more, and if, as is probable, the new shop and cottages induce a little rivalry, we must be content to let it live only in our recollections. Now, I do believe that this very greatly accounts for the ugliness of modern designing as compared with old. There would not have been such a desire to consider oneself only, and let all the rest of the world be of no account in our eyes. Probably, any one designing new premises under some such conditions as I have indicated would have remembered that he had such things to respect as a neighbour, and hardly have been so ready to remove his landmarks. It by no means follows, however, that because buildings multiply there must of some necessity be a crowding up; and an almost random instance is given on the next page of a city scene from York.

Here the White Swan' and the York Herald' divide the pavement in the middle of an irregular row of houses, the view of which is cut off by St. Sampson's church. The spire rises in the distance with sufficient force to form an incisive object, and the group, simple as it is, is very pleasant. In the street shown here are the remains of the Parliament-house-for Parliaments were held at York as far back as the reign of Henry II. The quaint coaching-house that is traditionally connected with the parliaments, of course, is a building of less antiquity than the reign of Henry II., though probably it has seen at least four hundred summers. Of York, however, we have little now to say, except what pertains simply to the question in hand, the elements of picturesqueness in a city or town. Though so many buildings are shown in so small a space, the actual breadth is never lost. There are two churches, a newspaper office, and an inn, that all seem in some way to have found a modus vivendi without obscuring each other unduly. Indeed, we cannot do better than perambulate the streets of York in this locality, and notice how the scenes change at every step; whether the streets are narrow or broad, there is some new vista to delight the eye. Sometimes a cathedral tower disappears and another opens out in its place with some new combination, and sometimes for a little all disappear, and the ancient houses rise in perspective above the pinnacles of the Minster.

When these scenes were laid out, there was probably no studied design to attain them, but it would seem almost as if beauty had been inseparable from men's daily work. If a piece of furniture or household utensil was required, it was sure to be comely and quaint. We can no more design in their style now than we can write a ballad that could be passed off for an ancient one. Many have been the attempts to do the latter, and some of them have had a fair mea

sure of success, but just at last some fatal flaw appears, and we discover the new wine in old bottles. The ironwork for supporting a village sign, that was probably designed and wrought by a village blacksmith, would put a man in a similar position to shame now, and perhaps a man in a much higher position too.

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I cannot close the present series better than by introducing a row of cottages from Chiddingstone, near Penshurst: a name that is sufficient to fill any one's recollections with associations of beautty The country round here is one rich storehouse of ancient domestic architecture. Knowle, Hever, Ightham, are household words to

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