are much alike, or that each is alone in its
peculiarities. Before classification can take place, there must be a
collection and comparison of leading characteristics; and this is not
easily accomplished with the edifices scattered over a whole country.
It may be said that it was never done for Scotland, until Mr Billings
completed his great series of engravings of the baronial and
ecclesiastical antiquities of Scotland.

Taking the former--the baronial--for our text, we find ourselves now
for the first time in a condition to discover the leading features of
the Scottish school of architecture, and to connect it with the
history of Scotland. We know that until the wars of Wallace and Bruce,
the two countries, England and Scotland, could scarcely be said to be
entirely separated; at all events, they did not stand in open
hostility to each other. Endless animosities, however, naturally
followed a war in which the one country tried to enslave the other,
and where the weaker only escaped annihilation by a desperate
struggle. It is not unnatural, therefore, to expect that the habits of
the two countries diverged from each other as time passed on; and this
process is very distinctly shewn in the character of the edifices used
by the barons and lairds of Scotland. A very few of the oldest
strongholds resemble those of the same period in England. The English
baronial castle of the thirteenth century generally consisted of
several massive square or round towers, broad at the base, and
tapering upwards, arranged at distances from each other, so that lofty
embattled walls or curtains stood between them, making a ground-plan
of which the towers formed the angles. The doors and windows were
generally in the Gothic or pointed style of architecture, and the
vaulted chambers were frequently of the same. There are not above
three or four such edifices in Scotland. The most complete, perhaps,
is the old part of Caerlaverock, in Dumfriesshire; another fine
specimen is Dirleton, in East Lothian; and to these may be added
Bothwell, in Clydesdale, and Kildrummie, in Aberdeenshire.

This style was long followed in England. It is known as the baronial,
and architects in all parts of the country, when building a modern
mansion in the castellated manner, have invariably followed it. It is
easy to see, however, that it was early abandoned in Scotland, the
people not taking their forms of architecture from a nation with which
they had no connect