racter to the country which it
composes, that there is hardly a district five miles broad, which
preserves the same features of landscape through its whole width.[24]
If, for example, six foreigners were to land severally at Glasgow, at
Aberystwith, at Falmouth, at Brighton, at Yarmouth, and at Newcastle,
and to confine their investigations to the country within twenty miles
of them, what different impressions would they receive of British
landscape! If, therefore, there be as many forms of edifice as there
are peculiarities of situation, we can have no national style; and if we
abandon the idea of a correspondence with situation, we lose the only
criterion capable of forming a national style.[25]

[Footnote 24: Length is another thing: we might divide England into
strips of country, running southwest and northeast, which would be
composed of the same rock, and therefore would present the same
character throughout the whole of their length. Almost all our great
roads cut these transversely, and therefore seldom remain for ten miles
together on the same beds.]

[Footnote 25: It is thus that we find the most perfect schools of
architecture have arisen in districts whose character is unchanging.
Looking to Egypt first, we find a climate inducing a perpetual state of
heavy feverish excitement, fostered by great magnificence of natural
phenomena, and increased by the general custom of exposing the head
continually to the sun (Herodotus, bk. III. chap. 12); so that, as in a
dreaming fever we imagine distorted creatures and countenances moving
and living in the quiet objects of the chamber, the Egyptian endowed all
existence with distorted animation; turned dogs into deities, and leeks
into lightning-darters; then gradually invested the blank granite with
sculptured mystery, designed in superstition, and adored in disease; and
then such masses of architecture arose as, in delirium, we feel crushing
down upon us with eternal weight, and see extending far into the
blackness above; huge and shapeless columns of colossal life; immense
and immeasurable avenues of mountain stone. This was a perfect--that is,
a marked, enduring, and decided school of architecture, induced by an
unchanging and peculiar character of climate. Then in the purer air, and
among the more refined energies of Greece, architecture rose into a more
studied beauty, equally perfect in its school, because fostered in a
district not 50 miles square, and in its dep