of style, which can lead to the formation of a national Art.
If from these centres of more impressive edifices we wander to the suburbs, we find the same endless lines of sameness; so identical that house after house might seem to have been shaped under the same mould, carried on from site to site; and to be inscribed, each in one line of the contractor's book, with a simple Do. opposite the same repeated figures.
It is then to the commercial element of our social condition that we have to look for the growing prospects of London architecture; leaving those whose resources are in their country ancestral estates, to build on their property, as they do often very splendidly.
On this account I said just now, with satisfaction, that the improvements in this branch of Art are characteristic of our national condition. For it is the period of immense commercial prosperity, successful enterprise, and almost fabulous wealth; and it is right that this varied result of national industry should be read on its edifices so long as they may last.
The principle of such a connection may indeed be found in an older combination gradually increased. For any one standing at a point where he could see the Bank, the Exchange, the Mansion House, the Goldsmiths' Hall, and the Telegraph Office, would feel that his eye grasped the very keys of England's financial greatness, each wrought in forms not inharmonious, and superior to what any other standpoint in the metropolis presents.
