roups.

94. Such are the great divisions under which country and rural buildings
may be comprehended; but there are intermediate conditions, in which
modified forms of the cottage are applicable; and it frequently happens
that country which, considered in the abstract, would fall under one of
these classes, possesses, owing to its peculiar climate or associations,
a very different character. Italy, for instance, is blue country; yet it
has not the least resemblance to English blue country. We have paid
particular attention to wood; first, because we had not, in any previous
paper, considered what was beautiful in a forest cottage; and secondly,
because in such districts there is generally much more influence
exercised by proprietors over their tenantry, than in populous and
cultivated districts; and our English park scenery, though exquisitely
beautiful, is sometimes, we think, a little monotonous, from the want of
this very feature.

95. And now, farewell to the cottage, and, with it, to the humility of
natural scenery. We are sorry to leave it; not that we have any idea of
living in a cottage, as a comfortable thing; not that we prefer mud to
marble, or deal to mahogany; but that, with it, we leave much of what is
most beautiful of earth, the low and bee-inhabited scenery, which is
full of quiet and prideless emotion, of such calmness as we can imagine
prevailing over our earth when it was new in heaven. We are going into
higher walks of architecture, where we shall find a less close
connection established between the building and the soil on which it
stands, or the air with which it is surrounded, but a closer connection
with the character of its inhabitant. We shall have less to do with
natural feeling, and more with human passion; we are coming out of
stillness into turbulence, out of seclusion into the multitude, out of
the wilderness into the world.

_PART II._

The Villa.

THE MOUNTAIN VILLA: LAGO DI COMO:

THE LOWLAND VILLA:--ENGLAND:

THE BRITISH VILLA: PRINCIPLES OF COMPOSITION.

I.

THE MOUNTAIN VILLA--LAGO DI COMO.

96. In all arts or sciences, before we can determine what is just or
beautiful in a group, we must ascertain what is desirable in the parts
which compose it, separately considered; and therefore it will be most
advantageous in the present case, to keep out of the village and the
city, until we have searched hill and dale for examples of isolated
buildings. This mode o