"I give you the critic's words verbatim. I really looked at the young lady in astonishment, that she should see nothing but a want of liveliness in a picture, which most of us feel to be sublime. But Miss D——- had an old grudge against you, for not having made her papa's villa sufficiently prominent in your view of Hell-Gate."
"But, such a villa!" said Hubbard. "One of the ugliest within ten miles of New York. It is possible, sometimes, by keeping at a distance, concealing defects, and partially revealing columns through verdure, to make one of our Grecian-temple houses appear to advantage in a landscape; but, really, Mr. D——-'s villa was such a jumble, so entirely out of all just proportion, that I could do nothing with it; and was glad to find that I could put a grove between the spectator and the building: anybody but its inmates would have preferred the trees."
"Not at all; Miss D——- thought the absence of the portico, with its tall, pipe-stem columns, the row of dormer windows on the roof, and the non-descript belvidere crowning all, a loss to the public."
{"belvidere" = as used here, a raised turret on top of a house (Italian)}
"The miserable architecture of this country is an obstacle to a landscape painter, quite too serious to be trifled with, I can assure you," said Charlie.
"It must be confessed," said Mr. Ellsworth, "that the order of things has been reversed here. Architecture is usually called the parent of the fine arts; but with us she is the youngest of the family, and as yet the worst endowed. We had respectable pictures, long before we had a single building in a really good style; and now that we have some noble paintings and statuary, architecture still lags behind. What a noise they made in New York, only a few years since, about St. Thomas's Church!"
{St. Thomas's Church" = St. Thomas Episcopal Church was erected at the corner of Broadway and Houston Street, in New York City, in 1826, in the Gothic style which was only beginning to replace the Greek Revival. Susan Fenimore Cooper shared her father's dislike of Greek Revival houses that imitated Grecian temples, and his love of the Gothic}
"Yes," said Mr. Stryker; "the curse of the genius of architecture, which Jefferson said had fallen upon this country, has not yet been removed."
"Some of the most ludicrous objects I have ever laid my eyes on," said Hazlehurst, "have been pretending houses, and, I am sorry to say, churches too, in the interior of the country; chiefly in the would-be Corinthian and Composite styles. They set every rule of good taste and good sense at defiance, and look, withal, so unconscious of their absurdity, that the effect is as thoroughly ridiculous, as if it had been the object of the architect to make them so."
"For reason good," observed Mr. Wyllys; "because they are wanting in simplicity and full of pretension; and pretension is the root of all absurdity."