Page:Forget Me Not (1824).djvu/371

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REGENT STREET.
331

It was chiefly the property of the Crown, which possessed over it an immediate control—the old leases having expired, or nearly passed away. But in a metropolis, the inhabitants of which are so devoted to trade and the calculations needful to its transactions, the contingency of great prosperity is requisite to give force to this spirit of trade before a sufficient number of individuals can be found to join in so great a speculation, as the building of palaces for shops, and enriching them with wares of corresponding splendour.

All these circumstances have happily combined for the accomplishment of the New Street; but it required the union of other advantages for producing some of those distinctive differences from other streets, which are obvious upon the first view of the buildings themselves: much of this depended upon the architect, who arranged the whole.[1] It has evidently been one of his objects to avoid the common appearances of street-building, which consists of mere perforated walls—where one house is rarely distinguished from another but by the water-pipe line of partition. On the contrary, he has cultivated varieties of style, abrupt separations and varied altitudes of masses, bold contrasts of light and shadow, and all those properties

  1. ↑ John Nash, Esq.
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