belong to men, and not men to houses.

But whether we are content or not, it is evident that all hope of
improvement lies in the tendency, somewhat noticeable of late, to
the abnegation of exotic styles and graces. We have survived the
Parthenon pattern, and there seems to be a prospect that we shall
outlive the Gothic cottage. Even the Anglo-Italian bracketed villa
has seen its palmiest days apparently, and exhausted most of its
variations. We are in an extremely chaotic state just now; but there
seems to be an inclination towards more rational ways, at least in
the plans and general arrangement of houses.

Of course mere negation cannot carry us far. We sometimes hear it
said that it is as easy for a house to look well as to look ill, and
those who say this seem to think that the failure is due solely to
want of due consideration of the problem on the part of our builders,
and that we have but to leave out their blunders to get at a
satisfactory result. But if we look at the facts of the case, we
find the builders have some reason on their side.

Nothing can be more unsightly than the stalky, staring houses of our
villages, with their plain gable-roofs, of a pitch neither high
enough nor low enough for beauty, and disfigured, moreover, by mere
excrescences of attic windows, and over the whole structure the
awkward angularity, and the look of barren, mindless conformity and
uniformity in the general outlines, and the meagre, frittered effect
inherent in the material. But when we come to build, we find that
the blockheads who invented this style, or no-style, have got at the
cheapest way of supplying the first imperative demands of the people
for whom they build,--namely, to be walled in and roofed