The ideas connected in our minds with Gothic architecture are of a highly romantic and poetical nature, contrasted with the classical associations which the Greek and Roman styles suggest. Although our own country is nearly destitute of ruins and ancient time-worn edifices, yet the literature of Europe, and particularly of what we term the mother country, is so much our own, that we form a kind of delightful ideal acquaintance with the venerable castles, abbeys, and strongholds of the middle ages. Romantic as is the real history of those times and places, to our minds their charm is greatly enhanced by distance, by the poetry of legendary superstition, and the fascination of fictitious narrative. A castellated residence, therefore, in a wild and picturesque situation, may be interesting, not only from its being perfectly in keeping with surrounding nature, but from the delightful manner in which it awakens associations fraught with the most enticing history of the past.
