We have had a good deal of exhortation lately, now getting rather
wearisome, about avoiding pretence in architecture, and that we
should let things show for what they are. The avoidance of pretence
should begin farther back. If the house is _all_ pretence, we shall
not help it by "frankness of treatment" in details.

The house is the sign of man's entering into possession of the earth.
A houseless savage, living on wild game and accidental fruits, is an
alien in nature, or a minor not yet come to his estate. As soon as
he begins to cultivate the soil he builds him a house,--no longer a
hut or a cave but the work of his own hands, and as permanent as his
tenure of the cultivated field. If that is to descend to his children,
the house must be so built as to endure accordingly. It is the
material expression of the _status_ of the family,--such people in
such a place. Hence the two-fold requirement of fitness for its use
and of harmony with its surroundings. A log-house is the appropriate
dwelling of the lumberer in the woods; but transplant it to a
suburban lawn and it becomes an absurdity, and a double absurdity.
It is not in harmony with the place, nor fit for the use of the
citizen. Nothing more satisfactory in their place than the old
English parish-churches; but transfer one of them from its natural
atmosphere and surroundings to the midst of one of our raw villages
or bustling cities, exposed to the sudden and violent changes of our
climate,--the open timber roof admitting the heat and the cold, and
the stone walls bedewed with condensed moisture,--and after the first
pleasant impression of the moment is over, there is left only a
painful feeling of mimicry, not to be removed by any precision of
copying, nor by the feeble attempts at ivy in the corners.