Page:The Poetry of Architecture.djvu/182

170 never mellowed by damp or anything else, and spoils everything near it by its intolerable and inevitable glare. The moderately dark brick, of a neutral red, is to be chosen, and this, after a year or two, will be farther softened in its colour by atmospheric influence, and will possess all the advantages we have enumerated. It is almost unnecessary to point out its fitness for a damp situation, not only as the best material for securing the comfort of the inhabitant, but because it will the sooner contract a certain degree of softness of tone, occasioned by microscopic vegetation, which will leave no more brick-red than is agreeable to the feelings where the atmosphere is chill.

Secondly. Even this kind of red is a very powerful colour; and as, in combination with the other primitive colours, very little of it will complete the light, so, very little will answer every purpose in landscape composition, and every addition, above that little, will be disagreeable. Brick, therefore, never should be used in large groups of buildings, where those groups are to form part of landscape scenery: two or three houses, partly shaded with trees, are all that can be admitted at once. There is no object more villainously destructive of natural beauty, than a large town, of very red brick, with very scarlet tiling, very tall chimneys, and very few trees; while there are few objects that harmonise more agreeably with the feeling of English ordinary landscape, than the large, old, solitary, brick manor house, with its group of dark cedars on the