Others will go back to
the range of Elizabethan gables; but none will have any idea of a fixed
character, stamped on a class of national edifices. This is very
melancholy, and very discouraging; the more so, as it is not without
cause.
149. In the first place, Britain unites in itself so many geological
formations, each giving a peculiar character 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.
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