[Illustration: 172]
“God made the country,” said the poet: but in my heart I believe he
might have added--“The devil made architects.” Few cities--I scarcely
know of one--can boast of such environs as Dublin. The scenery,
diversified in its character, possesses attraction for almost every
taste: the woody glade--the romantic river--the wild and barren
mountain--the cultivated valley--the waving upland--the bold and rocky
coast, broken with promontory and island--are all to be found, even
within a few miles of the capital; while, in addition, the nature of our
climate confers a verdure and a freshness unequalled, imparting a depth
and colour to the landscape equal to this beauty of its outline.
Whether you travel inland or coastwise, the country presents a
succession of sites for building, there being no style of house for
which a suitable spot cannot readily be found; and yet, with all
this, the perverse taste of man has contrived, by incongruous and
ill-conceived architecture, to mar almost every point of view, and
destroy every picturesque feature of the landscape.
The liberty of the subject is a bright and glorious prerogative; and
nowhere should its exercise be more freely conceded than in those
arrangements an individual makes for his own domestic comfort, and the
happiness of his home.
That one man likes a room in which three people form a crowd, and that
another prefers an apartment spacious as Exeter Hall, is a matter of
individual taste, with which the world has nothing whatever to do.
Your neighbour in the valley may like a cottage not larger than a
sugar-hogshead, with rats for company and beetles for bedfellows; your
friend on the hill-side may build himself an imaginary castle, with
armour for furniture, and antique weapons for ornaments;--with all
this you have no concern--no more than with his banker's book, or the
thoughts of his bosom: but should the one or the other, either by a
thing like a piggery, or an incongruous mass like a jail, destroy all
the beauty and mar all the effect of the scenery for miles round, far
beyond the precincts of his own small tenure--should he outrage all the
principles of taste, and violate every sentiment of landscape beauty,
by some poor and contemptible, or some pretentious and vulgar
edifice--then, do I say, you are really aggrieved; and against such a
man you have a just and equitable complaint, as one interfering with the
natural pleasures and just enjoyments to which, as a free citizen of a
free state, you have an indubitable, undeniable right.
That waving, undulating meadow, hemmed in with its dark woods, and
mirrored in the fair stream that flows peacefully beneath it, was never,
surely, intended to be disfigured with a square house like a salt-box,
and a verandah like a register-grate: the far-stretching line of yellow
coast that you see yonder, where the calm sea is sleeping, land locked
by those jutting headlands, was never meant to be pock marked with those
vile bathing lodges, with green baize draperies drying before them.
Was that bold and granite-sided mountain made thus to be hewed out into
parterres for polyanthuses, and stable-lanes for Cockneys' carmen?--or
is the margin of our glorious bay, the deep frame-work of the bright
picture, to be carved into little terraces, with some half-dozen slated
cabins, or a row of stiff-looking, Leeson-street-like houses, with brass
knockers and a balcony? Forbid it, heaven! We have a board of wide and
inconvenient streets, who watch over all the irregularities of municipal
architecture, and a man is no more permitted to violate the laws of good
taste, than he is suffered to transgress those of good morals. Why not
have a similar body to protect the fairer part of the created globe? Is
Pill-lane more sacred than Bray-head? Has Copper-alley stronger claims
than the Glen-of-the Downs? Is the Cross-poddle more classic ground than
Poolaphuca?