aking a commonplace villa,
and to make it insufferably ugly in each particular; to attempt the
homeliest achievement and to attain the bottom of derided failure; not
to have any theory but profit, and yet, at an equal expense, to outstrip
all competitors in the art of conceiving and rendering permanent
deformity; and to do this in what is, by nature, one of the most
agreeable neighbourhoods in Britain:--what are we to say, but that this
also is a distinction, hard to earn although not greatly worshipful?

Indifferent buildings give pain to the sensitive; but these things
offend the plainest taste. It is a danger which threatens the amenity of
the town; and as this eruption keeps spreading on our borders, we have
ever the farther to walk among unpleasant sights, before we gain the
country air. If the population of Edinburgh were a living, autonomous
body, it would arise like one man and make night hideous with arson; the
builders and their accomplices would be driven to work, like the Jews of
yore, with the trowel in one hand and the defensive cutlass in the
other; and as soon as one of these masonic wonders had been consummated,
right-minded iconoclasts should fall thereon and make an end of it at
once.

Possibly these words may meet the eye of a builder or two. It is no use
asking them to employ an architect; for that would be to touch them in a
delicate quarter, and its use would largely depend on what architect
they were minded to call in. But let them get any architect in the world
to point out any reasonably well-proportioned villa not his own design;
and let them reproduce that model to satiety.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CALTON HILL

The east of New Edinburgh is guarded by a craggy hill, of no great
elevation, which the town embraces. The old London road runs on one side
of it; while the New Approach, leaving it on the other hand, completes
the circuit. You mount by stairs in a cutting of the rock to find
yourself in a field of monuments. Dugald Stewart has the honours of
situation and architecture; Burns is memorialized lower down upon a
spur; Lord Nelson, as befits a sailor, gives his name to the top-gallant
of the Calton Hill. This latter erection has been differently and yet,
in both cases, aptly compared to a telescope and a butterchurn;
comparisons apart, it ranks among the vilest of men's handiworks. But
the chief feature is an unfinished range of columns, "the Modern Ruin"
as it has been called, an