erself has made the law that beauty is _variety_. Monotony,
though magnificent, will become irksome, but variety is an unceasing
delight. Versailles, with its formal avenues of shorn foliage, and its
geometrical lawns and terraces, may please you more at first sight than
an English park, because the mind feels a sort of pride in being able to
grasp such vast ideas at a glance. But you will find, upon a second or
third visit, that the unnatural arrangement of the French pleasure
grounds has something of staleness about it. Nature disdains such
bondage. Louis XIV, it is said, grew weary of his splendid plaything,
almost before it was finished. How different the English landscape
garden, where graceful sweeps and irregular masses of foliage meet the
eye with unlooked-for beauties at every turn! Well do we remember how,
after a few days spent in viewing the grand dullness of the Bavarian
capital, we looked wearily back to the delightful visit we made at
Nuremberg, with its curious old streets and fountains:

'Quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint old town of art and song;
Memories haunt thy pointed gables like the rooks that round them throng.'

To claim the merit of variety for our streets is wrong, for they are not
varied, but only incongruous. Their variety is rather that of an
architectural museum than the result of any combination. We have styles
enough, in all conscience, but none that will tolerate any other.

Against this may be urged the very argument with which we set out, that
a nation's architecture should be the exponent of its national
character, and as we are made up of every people and every class, that
this heterogeneous _melange_ is our normal style. But mark the
distinction: Although we are made up of so many diverse elements, yet
the component parts are severally and mutually held in solution. Each so
affects the mass as to give rise to a new element--not a mere union, but
a result--not an addition, but a multiplication. But with the
representative art, the materials have merely come in contact--nothing
more. Our houses lack that social element which characterizes our
people. Each is itself, and itself alone, ruining the appearance of its
neighbors, and ruined by them in turn. _Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo_,
is the only law; while we are a chemical solution, our architecture is
only a mechanical one.

How proceed, then, to develop our national style, that unborn something
which a future age