the natural consequence of an ample provision for his enjoyment, not the continuous struggle of suffering existence with a rude heaven and rugged soil.  There is nobility in such a struggle, but not when it is maintained by the inhabitant of the villa, in whom it is unnatural, and therefore injurious in its effect.  The narrow cottage on the desolate moor, or the stalwart hospice on the crest of the Alps, each leaves an ennobling impression of energy and endurance; but the possessor of the villa should call, not upon our admiration, but upon our sympathy; and his function is to deepen the impression of the beauty and the fullness of creation, not to exhibit the majesty of man; to show, in the intercourse of earth and her children, not how her severity may be mocked by their heroism, but how her bounty may be honored in their enjoyment.

[Footnote 45:  For instance, one proprietor terrifies the landscape all round him, within a range of three miles, by the conspicuous position of his habitation; and is punished by finding that, from whatever quarter the wind may blow, it sends in some of his plate-glass.  Another spoils a pretty bit of crag by building below it, and has two or three tons of stone dropped through his roof, the first frosty night.  Another occupies the turfy slope of some soft lake promontory, and has his cook washed away by the first flood.  We do not remember ever having seen a dwelling-house destroying the effect of a landscape, of which, considered merely as a habitation, we should wish to be the possessor.]

[Footnote 46:  We are not thinking of the effect upon the human frame of the air which is favorable to vegetation.  Chemically considered, the bracing breeze of the more sterile soil is the most conducive to health, and is practically so, when the frame is not perpetually exposed to it; but the keenness which checks the growth of the plant is, in all probability, trying, to say the least, to the constitution of a resident.]

[Footnote 47:  We hope the English language may long retain this corrupt but energetic superlative.]

219.  This position, being once granted, will save us a great deal of trouble; for it will put out of our way, as totally unfit for villa residence, nine-tenths of all mountain scenery; beginning with such bleak and stormy bits of hillside as that which was metamorphosed into something like a forest by the author of “Waverley;” laying an equal veto on all the severe landscapes of such districts of minor mountains as the Scotch Highlands and North Wales; and finishing by setting aside all the higher sublimity of Alp and Apennine.  What, then, has it left us?  The gentle slope of the lake shore, and the spreading parts of the quiet valley in almost all scenery; and the shores of the Cumberland lakes in our own, distinguished as they are by a richness of soil, which, though generally manifested only in an exquisite softness of pasture and roundness of undulation, is sufficiently evident to place them out of the sweeping range of this veto.