m rather an
encroachment on the liberty of the subject, inasmuch as it would prevent
people from indulging their edificatorial fancies, unless they knew
something about the matter, or, as the sufferers would probably
complain, from doing what they liked with their own. But the mistake
would evidently lie in their supposing, as people too frequently do,
that the outside of their house _is_ their own, and that they have a
perfect right therein to make fools of themselves in any manner, and to
any extent, they may think proper. This is quite true in the case of
interiors; every one has an indisputable right to hold himself up as a
laughing-stock to the whole circle of his friends and acquaintances, and
to consult his own private asinine comfort by every piece of absurdity
which can in any degree contribute to the same; but no one has any right
to exhibit his imbecilities at other people's expense, or to claim the
public pity by inflicting public pain. In England, especially, where, as
we saw before, the rage for attracting observation is universal, the
outside of the villa is rendered, by the proprietor's own disposition,
the property of those who daily pass by, and whom it hourly affects with
pleasure or pain. For the pain which the eye feels from the violation of
a law to which it has been accustomed, or the mind from the occurrence
of anything jarring to its finest feelings, is as distinct as that
occasioned by the interruption of the physical economy, differing only
inasmuch as it is not permanent; and, therefore, an individual has as
little right to fulfill his own conceptions by disgusting thousands, as,
were his body as impenetrable to steel or poison, as his brain to the
effect of the beautiful or true, he would have to decorate his carriage
roads with caltrops, or to line his plantations with upas trees.

172. The violation of general feelings would thus be unjust, even were
their consultation productive of continued vexation to the individual:
but it is not. To no one is the architecture of the exterior of a
dwelling-house of so little consequence as to its inhabitant. Its
material may affect his comfort, and its condition may touch his pride;
but, for its architecture, his eye gets accustomed to it in a week, and,
after that, Hellenic, Barbaric, or Yankee, are all the same to the
domestic feelings, are all lost in the one name of Home. Even the
conceit of living in a chalet, or a wigwam, or a pagoda, cannot retai