[Illustration: WINDOW IN OLD FARM-HOUSE NEAR SALISBURY.]
[Illustration: MARKET PLACE, PETERBOROUGH.]
THE FEN COUNTIES, AND THEIR PICTURESQUENESS--ELY--CAMBRIDGE--HUNTINGDON--MARKET BOSWORTH--BEDFORD--ADVANTAGES OF WATER POWER--LINCOLN--GAINSBOROUGH--GRANTHAM--STAMFORD--ANGEL INN, GRANTHAM.
The Fen countries in Bedford, Cambridge, Lincoln, and Northampton, have a certain amount of picturesque beauty of their own that is well suited for an artist, and out of which an architect, with a proper feeling for his subject, may make anything. There is a peculiar interest in the thought that all has been reclaimed by human labour from the wilderness. These counties do not present such insuperable difficulties for cultivation as Holland, because they are above the level of the sea, and do not require to be pumped dry like the Low Countries. The latter, indeed, would be flooded over if human energy were to cease in protecting them for one single year. The most curious feature in these vast dreary flats is the splendour of the ecclesiastical buildings that rise up above the horizons at great distances. Peterborough is hardly out of sight before the towers of Ely appear, vast and gray. The homesteads on these flats are generally good, for the farmers, to make amends for their solitude, can always procure plenty of good land at a comparatively low rental, and their dwellings have a picturesqueness of their own among stacks of turf and stunted orchards. After passing Chittisham, on the Ely road, all begins to mend--the land gently rises, hedgerows reappear, marsh willows give way to beech and elm, and the towers of Ely stand grandly out against the sky. The entrance to the close here shown is a wonderful example of picturesque beauty; as for architecture, in the modern sense of the term, it possesses none, but it simply owes its pleasing appearance to the quaint combination of its parts, all of which are plain. There is nothing whatever to prevent its being adapted to an entrance for workshops or a builder’s yard, and so enlivening a dreary street. The only difficulty is in always being able to find the architect capable of designing anything so picturesque.
The Rev. Mr. J. Petit raises the question of what constitutes picturesqueness in architecture. An artist, he says, will instinctively fall into the best method of treating his picture, and that, he says, is the way with the best architects; their task either comes naturally, or is so formed by study as to take its place, while at work, and the charm of their designs is that they do not seem to be weighing or adjusting every little bit of light or shade or projection. “An architect who thus forms his taste, and then follows it without too apparent reference to rule, produces works of far higher merit than one whose evident aim is either fantastic grouping on the one side, or conventional correctness on the other.”