ABERDEEN:-STREET ARCHITECTURE IN THE

SCHOOLHILL.

THE street architecture of the Scottish towns has not obtained so much attention as its peculiarities and merits entitle it to. It has often been remarked, that if the tide of prosperity were to desert London, and the population to leave it, in a very few years it would present nothing but a huge heap of brick-dust, with here and there a stone ruin rising through the mass. If the same fate should overtake all our cities together, the very last to lose its original shape and structure would be Aberdeen, where all the domestic as well as the public edifices are built of that indestructible material, granite, which has left us the edifices of the ancient Egyptians fresh and clean after three thousand years have passed over them. The brick and timber towns of England undergo a perpetual reproduction, which sweeps away the vestiges of early domestic architecture, and adjusts everything to the tastes and habits of the time being. The very oldest streets of London have an air of yesterday about them-a brick-and-plaster newness that tells of recent origin, and points to quick decay. In the Northern towns, on the other hand, many of the streets and lanes are old fortifications-living memorials of the day when the Scotsman's house was literally his castle. Modernisation may be more useful for domestic ease and for sanitary purposes, but our old stone streets have the decided superiority in picturesqueness and interest.

The gloomy masses of the Old Town of Edinburgh are well known; but they derive their interest almost entirely from their size and remarkable position: very few of them have architectural merits. It would seem as if the extraordinary height of the houses, caused by the necessity of keeping within the walls, interfered with any attempts at ornament. In the architecture of the time the decoration was nearly all on the top of the building; and as the highest flat or house, in the upright street called a common stair, was generally occupied by the poorest family of the group, it was not likely that much needless expense would be laid out on it. In the other towns, however, where the neighbouring gentry had separate edifices for their town-houses or hotels, they were often as richly decorated with masonry as their country mansions. Of such buildings we have specimens in Stirling, Dundee, Greenock, Maybole, Elgin, and especially in Aberdeen. In other places the town-house or tolbooth may be the only specimen, on a considerable scale, of this interesting national system of architecture; and the numerous decayed villagesespecially those which skirt Fifeshire-present a variety of such lightly castellated edifices as are seen in the illuminated illustrations of Froissart. Though most of them are derived from the French school, yet they follow a variety of foreign types: for instance, there is an old belfry on the town-house of Inverkeithing of very pure Palladian.

Aberdeen is remarkable for the number of private dwellings ornamented by that light, graceful, angular turret which was adapted from the French chateau architecture; and they are a lasting and striking memorial of the extent to which, before the union of the Crowns, the habits and ideas of our Continental allies were finding their way into the most distant parts of Scotland. The house in the accompanying Plate is a very pleasing and picturesque specimen of this style. There are several others in the old parts of the town, as in the Gallowgate, the

ABERDEEN:-STREET ARCHITECTURE IN THE SCHOOLHILL, 1—2.