and no plane-tree; next morning ’tis the turn of the great sweeping layers of darkness that the ancient cedars thrust out from them, very treasures of loveliness and romance; they are gone too:  you may have a faint hope left that the thick bank of lilac next your house may be spared, since the newcomers may like lilac; but ’tis gone in the afternoon, and the next day when you look in with a sore heart, you see that once fair great garden turned into a petty miserable clay-trampled yard, and everything is ready for the latest development of Victorian architecture—­which in due time (two months) arises from the wreck.

Do you like it?  You I mean, who have not studied art and do not think you care about it?

Look at the houses (there are plenty to choose from)!  I will not say, are they beautiful, for you say you don’t care whether they are or not:  but just look at the wretched pennyworths of material, of accommodation, of ornament doled out to you! if there were one touch of generosity, of honest pride, of wish to please about them, I would forgive them in the lump.  But there is none—­not one.

It is for this that you have sacrificed your cedars and planes and may-trees, which I do believe you really liked—­are you satisfied?

Indeed you cannot be:  all you can do is to go to your business, converse with your family, eat, drink, and sleep, and try to forget it, but whenever you think of it, you will admit that a loss without compensation has befallen you and your neighbours.

Once more neglect of art has done it; for though it is conceivable that the loss of your neighbouring open space might in any case have been a loss to you, still the building of a new quarter of a town ought not to be an unmixed calamity to the neighbours:  nor would it have been once:  for first, the builder doesn’t now murder the trees (at any rate not all of them) for the trifling sum of money their corpses will bring him, but because it will take him too much trouble to fit them into the planning of his houses:  so to begin with you would have saved the more part of your trees; and I say your trees, advisedly, for they were at least as much your trees, who loved them and would have saved them, as they were the trees of the man who neglected and murdered them.  And next, for any space you would have lost, and for any unavoidable destruction of natural growth, you would in the times of art have been compensated by orderly beauty, by visible signs of the ingenuity of man and his delight both in the works of nature and the works of his own hands.