If the English have no imagination, they should not scorn to be commonplace; or rather they should remember that poverty cannot be disguised by beggarly borrowing, that it may be ennobled by calm independence.  Our national architecture never will improve until our population are generally convinced that in this art, as in all others, they cannot seem what they cannot be.  The scarlet coat or the turned-down collar, which the obsequious portrait-painter puts on the shoulders and off the necks of his savage or insane customers, never can make the ’prentice look military, or the idiot poetical; and the architectural appurtenances of Norman embrasure or Veronaic balcony must be equally ineffective, until they can turn shopkeepers into barons, and schoolgirls into Juliets.  Let the national mind be elevated in its character, and it will naturally become pure in its conceptions; let it be simple in its desires, and it will be beautiful in its ideas; let it be modest in feeling, and it will not be insolent in stone.  For architect and for employer, there can be but one rule; to be natural in all that they do, and to look for the beauty of the material creation as they would for that of the human form, not in the chanceful and changing disposition of artificial decoration, but in the manifestation of the pure and animating spirit which keeps it from the coldness of the grave. [With this remarkable foreshadowing of Mr. Ruskin’s Art-teaching compare Seven Lamps and Lectures on Architecture and Painting, throughout.]]

226.  So much for size.  The question of position need not detain us long, as the principles advanced in Sec. 104 are true generally, with one exception.  Beautiful and calm the situation must always be, but—­in England—­not conspicuous.  In Italy, the dwelling of the descendants of those whose former life has bestowed on every scene the greater part of the majesty which it possesses, ought to have a dignity inherent in it, which would be shamed by shrinking back from the sight of men, and majesty enough to prevent such non-retirement from becoming intrusive; but the spirit of the English landscape is simple, and pastoral and mild, devoid, also, of high associations (for in the Highlands and Wales almost every spot which has the pride of memory is unfit for villa residence); and, therefore, all conspicuous appearance of its more wealthy inhabitants becomes ostentation, not dignity; impudence, not condescension.  Their dwellings ought to be just evident, and no more, as forming part of the gentle animation and present prosperity which is the beauty of cultivated ground.  And this partial concealment may be effected without any sacrifice of the prospect which the proprietor will insist upon commanding from his windows, and with great accession to his permanent enjoyment.