ugly features. In my opinion, this American architect understands the adaptation of a Jacobean manor-house better than any other of his day.
It is style and historical development—not fashion—that produces the architectural comedy—its story, its personality, its life. And now that I am about to speak again of the most popular kind of houses of all in America—Colonial houses, notwithstanding the very great number of them erected during the last decade or two, I am yet almost in despair of finding illustrations where the architectural comedy, its personality and life are to be sufficiently discovered. Perhaps the firm of architects who have been most noted as specialists in this line have done nothing better than the house they designed in the eighties of the last century for Mr. William Edgar, on Beach Street in Newport (see [Plate XCV]). This design was always very much superior to that of the Taylor house, of which I drew a sketch for Chapter IX; and as time goes on the gap between them widens, while I do not see that the Edgar house loses by contrast with a number of much more pretentious successors in the same style of composition.
That there is so much room for general improvement in America is what I have to offer in extenuation for the questionable sarcasms into which I have sometimes fallen in these articles. Because of its salutary influence, I have found sarcasm useful in scoring my points, preferring it greatly to flattery, which D’Israeli used, he averred, for the same purpose—he “found it useful”—adding, “and when it comes to royalty you want to lay it on with a trowel.” I do not know that the simile holds good as far as that, and I fear my sarcastic allusions have already become fatiguing.
In glancing back over what I have written, I find yet another class of architects and another theory of architecture to which no credit has been given. I refer now to that class of architects who publish books of readymade plans, and who advertise for clients in the periodicals, and to their theory of architecture which does not allow that the artist enters into the proposition. This is as I understand it, at least, from one of their advertisements, which reads, “Plans made not by an artist, but by an architect.”
Bored nearly to death by having to listen to unwelcome
GARDEN GATE AT WYOMING, N. J.
