With respect to this class of dwellings we have little complaint to make, for many of our town residences are highly elegant and beautiful. But how shall we designate that singular perversity of taste, or rather that total want of it, which prompts the man, who, under the name of a villa residence, piles up in the free open country, amid the green fields, and beside the wanton gracefulness of luxuriant nature, a stiff modern "three story brick," which, like a well bred cockney with a true horror of the country, doggedly seems to refuse to enter into harmonious combination with any other object in the scene, but only serves to call up the exclamation, Avaunt, stiff pile ! why didst thou stray From blocks congenial in Broadway!
Yet almost daily we see built up in the country huge combinations of boards and shingles, without the least attempt at adaptation to situation; and square masses of brick start up here and there, in the verdant slopes of our village suburbs, appearing as if they had been transplanted, by some unlucky incantation, from the close-packed neighborhood of city residence, and left accidentally in the country, or, as Sir Walter Scott has remarked, "had strayed out to the country for an airing."
