Chapter 7 - Page 2

to the sensitive;
but these things offend the plainest taste. It is a
danger which threatens the amenity of the town; and as
this eruption keeps spreading on our borders, we have
ever the farther to walk among unpleasant sights, before
we gain the country air. If the population of Edinburgh
were a living, autonomous body, it would arise like one
man and make night hideous with arson; the builders and
their accomplices would be driven to work, like the Jews
of yore, with the trowel in one hand and the defensive
cutlass in the other; and as soon as one of these masonic
wonders had been consummated, right-minded iconoclasts
should fall thereon and make an end of it at once.

Possibly these words may meet the eye of a builder
or two. It is no use asking them to employ an architect;
for that would be to touch them in a delicate quarter,
and its use would largely depend on what architect they
were minded to call in. But let them get any architect
in the world to point out any reasonably well-
proportioned villa, not his own design; and let them
reproduce that model to satiety.