should rather say knowing and unscrupulous. All that is demanded of
a house is, that it should be of an "improved style," or at least
"something different." Nothing will excuse it, if old-fashioned,--
and hardly anything condemn it, if it have novelty enough.

And this latitude is not confined to the owner's scheme of his house,
but extends also to the executive department. In other countries,
however extravagant your fancy, you are brought within some bounds
when you come to carry it out; for the architect and the builder have
been trained to certain rules and forms, and these will enter into
all they do. But here every man is an architect who can handle a
T-square, and every man a builder who can use a plane or a trowel;
and the chances are that the owner thinks he can do all as well as
either of them. For if every man in England thinks he can write a
leading article, much more every Yankee thinks he can build a house.
Never was such freedom from the rule of tradition. A fair field and
no favor; whatever that can accomplish we shall have.

The result, it must be confessed, is not gratifying. For if you
sometimes find a man who is satisfied with his own house, yet his
neighbors sneer at it, and he at his neighbors' houses. And even with
himself it does not usually wear well. The common case is that even
he accepts it as a confessed failure, or at best a compromise. And
if he does not confess the failure, (for association, pride,
use-and-wont reconcile one to much), the house confesses it. For
what else but self-confessed failures are these thin wooden or cheap
brick walls, temporarily disguised as massive stone,--this roof,
leaking from the snow-bank retained by the Gothic parapet, or the
insufficient slope which the "Italian style" demands?