below--planting trees indeed, "plantations," but seldom woods, and
practically never forests at all. This again brings out the fact that
the French nobles, despite our urban associations with regard to them
have belonged far more than ours to the social formation and tradition
of the hunter--while ours, despite their love of sports, are yet
fundamentally squires, i.e., essentially and historically approximating
to the peasants of their villages. The bearing of all this upon their
respective history will be obvious. Here again we have the origins of
the vivid contrast of the English or so-called naturalistic style of
landscape-gardening with the more formal French tradition. Yet in a very
true sense we see the former to be even more highly artificial than the
latter. [Page: 138] The English citizen who may even admit this way of
looking at the contrasted city plans of London and Paris may fail,
unless he has appreciated the principle here involved, to see why London
and Paris houses are so different--the one separate and self-contained,
with its door undefended and open upon the street, while the normal
Parisian house is a populous, high-piled tenement around a central
court, with high _porte cochère_ closed by massive oaken doors and
guarded by an always vigilant and often surly _concierge_.

A moment of historical reflection suffices to see that the former is the
architecture of a long-settled agricultural place, with its spreading
undefended villages, in which each household had its separate dwelling,
the other a persistence of the Continental fortified city crowded within
its walls.

But beyond this we must see the earlier historic, the simpler geographic
origins of the French courtyard house as a defensible farmyard, of which
the ample space was needed nightly for defence against wild beasts, if
not also wilder men, against whom the _concierge_ is not only the