to them by his skill. Still more the canvas and pigments of the
painter. But in architecture the wood and stone still fulfil the
offices of covering, connecting, and supporting, as they did in the
tree and the quarry, and their physical properties play an essential
part in the work. The house, therefore, is a work of art only half
emancipated from nature, and must depend on nature for much of its
beauty also. It must not be isolated, as something merely to be
looked at, apart from its position and its material use.

The common mistake in our houses is, that they are designed, as
inexperienced persons choose their paper-hangings, to be something
of themselves, and not as mere background, as they should be. Thus
it is that people seek to beautify their houses by ornamenting them,
as a vulgar person sticks himself over with jewelry. A man's house
is only a wider kind of dress; and as we do not call a man
well-dressed when we are forced to see his dress before we see him,
so a house cannot be satisfactory when it isolates itself from its
inmates and from the landscape. In such houses, the more _effort_
the worse they are; they may cheat us for the moment, but the oftener
we see them the less we like them. Does not the uncomfortable
sensation with which fine houses so often oppress us arise from the
vague feeling that the owner has built himself out of his house, and
his house out of the landscape?

Hence it is mostly the novices that build the fine houses. A man of
sense, I think, will generally build his second house plainer than
his first. Not that he desires, perhaps, any the less what he
desired before, but he is more alive to the difficulties and to the
cost, and takes refuge in the safety of a lower scale. His
experience has taught him that where he succeeded best he was really