The Craze of Christina — page 19: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Craze of Christina. 15 adorned at its entrance by a colonnade of white pillars forming a long, solid porch across the drive, which swept under its shelter up to the front door, after a fashion which has now gone out of date. Architecturally, there was no beauty whatever in the structure—the walls were stuccoed, the roof was of gray slate, and presented no pleasing irregularities of outline, and the long straight windows ran in two un- broken lines round all four sides of the building. The house was about a hundred years old, and had been built at that remarkable period, when art, and good taste, and the love of har- monious beauty seem to have been conspicu- ously and inexplicably extinct in the minds of the architects of this country. The men who built those great bald white country houses—of which not a few are scat- tered up and down the face of our England— appear to have had no regard for anything save size and squareness, and when first these houses arose amidst the green fairness of their sur- rounding parks and gardens, they must have presented a most painfully hideous appear- ance. Nevertheless, Time—who can be safely trusted to improve and ameliorate the very worst of human structures—had laid a softening finger GComichooksico