Having disposed of two grand categories of mistakes and absurdities in house-building, viz., lightness of structure and badness of material, we shall now address ourselves more particularly to the defects of Arrangement and Form, or, as an architect might term it, to the discussion of Plan and Elevation. The former task was ungrateful enough; for therein we had to attack the cupidity and meanness, and the desire for show and spurious display, which is the besetting sin of every Englishman who pays poor-rates; but, the present undertaking is hardly less hopeless, for we have to appeal to the intelligence, not only of architects and builders, but also of those who commission them.

Now, there is nothing drier and more unprofitable under the sun, nothing more nearly approaching to a state of addle, than a builder's brains. Your regular builders (and, indeed, not a few of your architects) are the sorriest animals twaddling about on two legs; mere vivified bags of sawdust, or lumps of lath and plaster, galvanised for a while, and forming themselves into strange, uncouth, unreasonable shapes. A mere "builder" has not two ideas in his head; he has only one; he can draw only one "specification," as he calls it, under different forms; he can make only one plan; he has one set of cornices always in his eye; one peculiar style of panel; one special cut of a chimney. You may trace him all through a town, or across a county, if his fame extends so far; a dull repetition of the same notion characterises all his works. He served his apprenticeship to old Plumbline, in Brick Lane; got up the Carpenter's Vade-Mecum by heart; had a little smattering of drawing from Daub the painter, and then set up in business for himself. As for Mr Triangle the architect, who built the grand town-hall here, the other-day, in the newest style of Egyptian architecture, and copied two mummies for door-posts, and who is now putting up the pretty little Gothic church for the Diocesan Church-and-Chapel-Building and Pew-Extension Society, with an east window from York, and a spire from Salisbury, and a west front from Lincoln—why, he is the veriest stick of a designer that ever applied a T-square to a stretching-board. He has studied Wilkins's Vitruvius, it is true, and he has looked all through Hunt's Tudor Architecture, but his imagination is as poor as when he began them; he has never in his life seen one of the good buildings he is pirating from, barring St Paul's and Westminster Abbey; he knows nothing finer than Regent Street and Pall-Mall, and yet he pretends to be a modern Palladio. It will not do, all this sham and parade of knowledge; we want a new generation, both of architects and builders, before we shall see any thing good arising in the way of houses—but as this new progeny is not likely to spring up within a few days, nor even years, we may as well buckle to the task of criticism at once, and find out faults, which we shall leave others to mend.

And, to lay the foundation of criticism in such matters once more and for ever, let us again assert that good common-sense, and a plain straight-forward perception of what is really useful, and suited to the wants of climate and locality, are worth all the other parts of any architect's education. These are the great qualities, without which he will take up his rulers and pencils in vain; without them, his ambitious faÇades and intricate plans will all come to nothing, except dust and rubbish. He may draw and colour like Barry himself; but unless he has some spark of the genius that animated old Inigo and Sir Christopher, some little inkling of William of Wickham's spirit within him, some sound knowledge of the fitness and the requirements of things, he had better throw down his instruments, and give it up as a bad job; he'll only "damn himself to lasting shame."

A moderate degree of science, an ordinarily correct eye, so as to tell which is straightest, the letter I or the letter S, and a good share of plain common-sense—these are the real qualifications of all architects, builders, and constructors whatsoever.

One other erroneous idea requires to be upset; the notion that our modern houses, merely because they are recent, are better built and more convenient than ancient ones. If there be one thing more certain than another in the matter, it is this, that a gentleman's house built in 1700, is far handsomer, stronger, and more convenient, than one built in 1800; and not only so, but if it had had fair play given it, would still outlive the newer one, and give it fifty years to boot;—and also that another house built in 1600, is stronger than the one raised in 1700, and has still an equal chance of survivorship; but that any veteran mansion which once witnessed the year 1500, is worth all the other three put together—not only for design and durability, but also for comfort and real elegance. Pick out a bit of walling or roofing some four or five centuries old, and it would take a modern erection of five times the same solidity to stand the same test of ages.

Let it not be supposed that our ancestors dwelt in rooms smaller, or darker, or smokier, than those we now cram ourselves into. Nothing at all of the kind; they knew what ease was, better than we do. They had glorious bay-windows, and warm chimney-corners, and well-hung buttery hatches, and good solid old oak tables, and ponderous chairs: had their windows and doors been only a little more air-tight, their comforts could not have been increased.

First of all, then, with regard to the plans best suited for the country residences of the nobility and gentry of England—of that high-minded and highly gifted aristocracy, which is the peculiar ornament of this island,—of that solid honest squirearchy, which shall be the sheet-anchor of the nation, after all our commercial gents, with their ephemeral prosperity, shall have disappeared from the surface of the land, and have been forgotten,—the plan of a house best suited for the "Fine old English Gentleman;" and we really do not care to waste our time in considering the convenience and the taste of any that do not rank with this class of men. It is absurd for any of the worthy members of that truly noble and generous class of men, to try to erect reminiscences of Italy, or any other southern clime, amid their own "tall ancestral groves" at home, here in old England. They have every right in the world to inhabit the palaces of Italy, which many a needy owner is glad to find them tenanting; they cannot but admire the noble proportions, the solid construction, the magnificent decorations, which meet their eyes on every side, whether at Genoa, at Verona, at Venice, at Florence, or at Rome. But it by no means follows, that what looks so beautiful, and is so truly elegant and suitable on the Lake of Como, will preserve the same qualities when erected on the banks of Windermere; those lovely villas that overlook the Val d'Arno, and where one could be content to spend the rest of one's days, with Petrarch and Boccacio, and Dante, and Michael Angelo, and Raffaelle, will not bear transplanting either to Richmond or Malvern. The climate and the sky and the earth of Tuscany and Piedmont, are not those of Gloucestershire and Warwickshire; what may be very harmonious in form and colour when contrasted with the objects of that country which produced it, may have the most disagreeable effect, and be excessively inconvenient, in another region with which it has no relation. Not that the proportions of style and the execution of detail may not be reproduced in England, if sufficient taste and money be applied,—but that all surrounding things are out of harmony with the very idea and existence of the building. The vegetable world is different: the external and internal qualities of the soil jar with the presence of the foreign-looking mansion. An English garden is not, nor can be, an Italian one; an English terrace can never be made to look like an Italian one; those very effects of light and shade on which the architect counted when he made his plans and elevations, are not to be attained under an English sky. The house, however closely it may be taken from the last Palazzo its noble owner lived in, will only be a poor-looking copy after all; and he will wonder, as he paces through its corridors and halls, or views it from every point of the compass on the outside, what can be the cause of such a failure of his hopes? He hoped for and expected an impossibility; he thought to raise up a little Italy in the midst of his Saxon park. Could the experiment end in any thing else than a failure?

Every climate and every country has its own peculiarities, which the inhabitants are found to consult, and which all architects will do well to observe closely before they lay down their plans. The general arrangement, the plan of a house, will depend upon this class of external circumstances more than on any other; while the architectural effect and design of the elevation will have an intimate relation to the physical appearance of the region, to the ideas, the pursuits, and the history of its people.

Thus it was with the ancient Greeks and Romans, as we find their domestic life revealed to us at Pompeii. In that delicious climate of Campania, where the sun shines with a whitening and ever unclouded splendour, and where winter's frosts may be said to be unknown, the great thing wanted was shady coolness, privacy, and the absence of all that might fatigue. Hence, in the arrangement of the Pompeian villas, windows were comparatively unknown: the rooms were lighted from above; the aperture for the light was open to the sky; whatever air could be procured was precious. Colonnades and dark passages were first-rate appendages of a fashionable man's habitation. His sleeping apartment was a dark recess impervious to the sun's rays, lighted only by the artificial glare of lamps, placed on those elegant candelabra, which must be admired as models of fitness and beauty as long as imitative art shall exist. He had not a staircase in all his house, or he would not have if he could help it. The fatigue of lifting the foot in that hot climate was a point of importance, and he carefully avoided it. The house was a regular frigidarium. It answered the end proposed. It was commodious, it was elegant—and it was therefore highly suitable to the people and the place. But it does not therefore follow that it ought to be imitated in a northern clime, nor indeed in any latitude, we would rather say in any country, except Italy itself. Few parts of France and Germany would admit of such erections—some portions of Spain and Greece might. In Greece, indeed, the houses are much after the same plan, but in Spain only portions of the south-eastern coast would allow of such a style of building being considered at all habitable.

Place, then, a Pompeian villa at Highgate or Hampstead—build up an Atrium with an Impluvium, add to it a Caldarium if you please, and a Viridarium, too,—and omne quod exit in um: but you will not thereby produce a good dwelling-house; far from it, you will have a show-box fit for Cockneys to come and gape at: but nothing else.

Now, if we would only follow the same rule of common sense that the Greek or Roman architect did on the shores of the Parthenopoean Gulf, we should arrive at results, different indeed, but equally congruous to our wants, equally correct and harmonious in idea. What is it that we want in this foggy, damp, and cloudy climate of ours, nine days out of every ten? Do we want to have a spacious colonnade and a portico to keep off every ray of a sun only too genial, only too scorching? Is the heavens so bright with his radiance that we should endeavour to escape from his beams? Are we living in an atmosphere of such high temperature that if we could now and then take off our own skins for a few minutes, we should be only too glad to do so? As far as our own individual sensations are concerned, we would that things were so; but we know from unpleasant experience that they are far otherwise.

We believe that every rational householder will agree with us, that the first thing to be guarded against in this country is cold, next wet, and thirdly darkness. A man who can really prove that he possesses a thoroughly warm, dry, and well-lighted house, may write himself down as a rerum dominus at once: a favoured mortal, one of Jove's right-hand men, and a pet of all the gods. He is even in imminent danger of some dreadful calamity falling upon him, inasmuch as no one ever attains to such unheard-of prosperity without being visited by some reverse of fortune. He is at the top of the fickle goddess's wheel, and the least impulse given to one of its many spokes must send him down the slippery road of trouble. Nevertheless, though difficult to attain, these three points are the main ones to be aimed at by every English builder and architect; let him only keep them as the stars by which he steers his course, and he will come to a result satisfactory in the end.

One other point is of importance to be attended to as a fundamental one, and indeed as one of superstruction too. From the peculiarly changeable nature of our climate, and from the provision that has to be made for thoroughly warming a house, there is always a danger of the ventilation and the drainage being neglected. Not one architect in a hundred ever allows such "insignificant" points as these to disturb his reveries. All that he is concerned in is his elevation, and his neatly executed details; but whether the inhabitants are stifled in their beds with hot foul air, or are stunk out of their rooms by the effluvia of drains, are to him mere bagatelles. No trifles these, to those who have to live in the house; no matter of insignificance to those who have an objection to the too frequent visits of their medical attendant.

In the first place, then, a gentleman's country house (we are adverting here to country residences alone—to those in the metropolitan haunts of men we shall return hereafter) should be thoroughly warm. Now, of course a man may make a fire-place as big as Soyer's great range at Crockford's—poor dear Crocky's, before it was reformed—and he may burn a sack of coals at a time in it; and he may have one of these in each apartment and lobby of his house—and a pretty warm berth he will then have of it; but it would be no thanks to his architect that he should thus be forced to encourage his purveyor of the best Wallsend. No: either let him see that the walls are of a good substantial thickness—none of the thin, hollow, badly set, sham walls of the general run of builders; but made either of solid blocks of good ashlar stone, with well-rammed rubble between, and this rubble again laid in an all-penetrating bed of properly sanded mortar with plenty of lime in it, and laid on hot, piping, steaming hot, if possible—and the joints of the stones well closed with cement or putty; or else let the walls be made of the real red brick, the clay two years old or more, well laid in English bond, and every brick in its own proper and distinct bed of mortar, as carefully made as before, and the joints cemented into the bargain. Nor let any stone wall be less than thirty-six, nor any brick wall than thirty inches thick; whereas, if the house exceeds two stories in height, some additional inches may yet be added to the thickness of the lower walls. These walls shall be proof against all cold, and, if they be not made of limestone, against wet also.

"But all this is horridly expensive! why, a house built after this fashion would cost three times the amount of any one now erected upon the usual specifications!" Of course it would. Materials and labour are not to be had gratuitously; but then, if the house costs three times as much, it will be worth three times more than what it would otherwise fetch, and it will last more than three times as long. "But what is the use of building for posterity? what does it matter whether the house is a good one in the time of the next possessor but six? Why not 'run up' a building that will have a handsome appearance in the present, my own life-time, and if my descendant wishes for a better one and a warmer one, why let him build another for himself? Add to which it will grow so dreadfully old-fashioned in fifty years hence, that it is a hundred to one if it is not voted a nuisance, and pulled down as an eyesore to the estate." Such is the reasoning commonly used when any architect more honest, more scientific, and more truly economical in his regard for his employer's means, ventures to recommend the building of a mansion upon principles, and with dimensions, which can alone fully satisfy the exigencies of his art. We take leave, however, to observe, that such ought not to be the reasoning of an English nobleman or gentleman. In the first place, what is really erected in a proper and legitimate style of architecture, be it classical or mediÆval, can never become "old-fashioned" or ugly. Is Hampton Court old-fashioned and ugly? is Audley End so? are Burghleigh and Hatfield so? If they are, go and build better. Is Windsor Castle so? yes, a large portion of it is, for its architecture is not very correct; and though it has been erected only so few years, in another fifty the reigning sovereign—if there be a sovereign in England in those days—will pull down most of it, and consider it as sham and as trumpery as the Pavilion has at length been found out to have been all along. True; if you build houses in a false and affected and unreal style of architecture, they are ugly from the very beginning; and they will become as old-fashioned as old Buckingham House or Strawberry Hill itself, perhaps in the life-time of him who owns them; or else, like Fonthill, they will crumble about your ears, and remain as monuments of your folly rather than of your taste. But go and build as Thorpe, or Inigo Jones, or Wren used to build. Or even, if you will travel abroad for your models, take Palladio himself for your guide, or Phillbert Delorme, or Ducerceau, or Mansard; and your erections shall stand for centuries, and become each year more and more harmoniously beautiful.

Next, your house should be dry; do not, then, go and build it with a slightly-framed low-pitched roof, nor place it in that part of your grounds which would be very suitable for an artificial lake, but not for your mansion. Do not be afraid of a high roof; but let it tower up boldly into the air; let there be, as the French architects of old used to term it most expressively, a good "forest" of timber in its framing; cover it with lead, if you can—if not, with flag-stones, or else, if these be too dear, with extra thick slates in as large slabs as can be conveniently worked, and as may be suitable to the framing,—least of all with tiles.

"But, good Lord! what ideas you have got of expense! Why, sir, do you know that such a house would cost a great deal of money! and besides this, I am almost certain that in ancient Rome, the houses had quite flat roofs, and even in Italy, at the present day, the palaces have remarkably low-pitched roofs!" Rome and Italy go to the —— Antipodes! Did you not stipulate that the house should be dry? do you think that the old Italians ever saw a good shower of rain in all their lives? did they? "Nocte pluit totÂ," is all very well in the poet's fugitive inscription; but did they ever see a six-weeks' rain, such as we have every autumn and spring, and generally in June and July, to say nothing of January and February, in Devonshire? My dear sir, if you wish to lie dry in your bed, and all your family, too, to the seventh generation, downwards, make your roof suited to the quantity of rain that falls; pitch up its sides not less steeply than forty-five degrees, and do not be afraid if it rises to sixty, and so gives you the true mediÆval proportion of the equilateral triangle. Do you consider it ugly? Then we will ornament it; and we will make the chimney-stalks rise with some degree of majesty, into an important feature of the architectural physiognomy of the building. Are you grumbling at the expense, as you did just now about that of the walls? What then! are you a Manchester manufacturer, some dirty cotton-spinner? have you no faith in the future? have you no regard for the dignity and comfort of your family? are you, too, bitten with the demoralising commercial spirit of the age? are you all for self and the present? have you no obligations towards your ancestors? and are you unwilling to leave a name to be talked of by your posterity? Why, to be sure it may tighten you up for five or six years; but then do not stop quite so long in London: make your season there rather shorter, and do not go so often to Newmarket, and keep away from White's or Boodle's, and do not be so mad as to throw away any more of those paltry thousands in contesting the county. Let the Parliament and the country take care of themselves; they can very well spare an occasional debater like yourself; the "glorious constitution" of old England will take no harm even if you do not assist in concocting the hum-bug that is every year added to its heterogeneous mixture. Lay out your money at home, drain your land, build a downright good house for yourself; do not forget your poor tenants, set them a good example, and let us put a proper roof on Hambledown Hall.

Providing, however, that the worthy squire actually consents to pull out a few more hundreds, for the sake of having walls of proper thickness and roofs of right pitch, it does not quite follow that his ground-floor rooms will be dry, unless the mansion is well vaulted underneath, and well drained, to boot. We have known more than one ancient manor-house, built in a low dead flat, with a river running by, and the joists of the ground floor resting on the soil, and, yet the whole habitation as dry as a bone; but still more numerous are the goodly edifices which we have witnessed, built on slopes, and even hills, where not a spoonful of water, you would say, could possibly lodge, and yet their walls outside all green with damp, and within mildew, and discoloured loose-hanging paper, telling the tale of the demon of damp. When you are seriously bent on building a good house, put plenty of money under ground; dig deep for foundations, lay them better and stronger even than your super-structure; vault every thing under the lower rooms—ay, vault them, either in solid stone or brick, and drain and counter drain, and explore every crick and cranny of your sub-soil; and get rid of your land springs; and do not let the water from any neighbouring hill percolate through your garden, nor rise into a pleasing jet-d'eau right under the floor of your principal dining-room. If you can, and if you do not mind the "old-fashioned" look of the thing, dig a good deep fosse all round your garden, and line it with masonry; and have a couple of bridges over it; you may then not only effectually carry off all intruding visits of the watery sprites, but you may keep off hares from your flower-beds, two-legged cats from your larder, and sentimental "cousins" from your maids. You may thus, indeed, make your hall or mansion into a little fortified place, with fosse and counter-scarp, and covered way, and glacis; or at any rate, you may put a plain English haw-haw ditch and fence all round the sacred enclosure; and depend upon it that you will find the good effects of this extra expense in the anti-rheumatic tendencies of your habitation.

And now for the plan of your mansion, for the Ground Plan—the main part of the business, that, on the proper proportioning and arranging of which the success of your edificative experiment entirely depends. Here take the old stale maxim into immediate and constant use, "Cut your coat according to your cloth;" and, if you are a man of only £2000 a-year, do not build a house on a plan that will require £10,000 at least of annual income to keep the window-shutters open. Nor, seeing that you are living in the country, attempt to cramp yourself for room, and build a great tall staring house, such as would pass muster in a city, but is exceedingly out of place in a park. As a matter of domestic Æsthetics, do not think of giving yourself, and still less any of your guests, the trouble of mounting up more than one set of stairs to go to bed, but keep your reception and principal rooms on the ground floor, and your private rooms, with all the bed-chambers, on the floor above. Since, however, you have determined on going to the expense of a proper roof, do not suppose that we are such bad architectural advisers as to recommend that the roof should be useless. No; here let the female servants and the children of the family, perhaps, too, a stray bachelor friend or two, find their lodging; and above all, if you are a family man, if you have any of those tender yearnings after posterity, which we hope you have, introduce into the roof a feature which we will remind you of by and by, and for which, if we could only persuade people that such a very old and useful idea were a new one, and our own, we would certainly take out a patent.

There should, then, be only two stories in a gentleman's country residence, and a dormer or mansard story if we may so term it, in the roof;—we will not be so vulgar as to call it a garret,—nor yet so classical as to resort to the appellation of an attic. If, therefore, you require a large house, take plenty of ground, and lay out all your rooms en suite. Let all the offices, whence any noise or smell can arise, be perfectly detached from the dwelling part of the mansion:—such as the kitchens, sculleries, laundries, &c. They should all be collected into a court with the coach-houses and stables on the outside, and the whole range of the domestic offices on the other. Never allow a kitchen to be placed under the same roof as your dining-room or drawing-room: cut it off completely from the corps de logis, and let it only communicate by a passage;—so shall you avoid all chance of those anticipatory smells, the odour of which is sufficient to spoil your appetite for the best dressed dinner in the world. If you would have any use for the vault under your house, keep all your cellar stores, and all your "dry goods" there;—it will be a test of your house being well-built if they do not show any effects of damp after a few months' stowage below the level of the soil, yet in aere pleno. We do not mean to say that we would put one of our best and newest saddles, nor our favourite set of harness, in one of the lower vaults, to judge of the dampness of the house; but depend upon it, a pair or two of old shoes form excellent hygrometers; and you may detect the "dew-point" upon them with wonderful accuracy.

"But only look at how you are increasing the cost of the house by thus stretching out the house, and really wasting the space and ground!"—What! still harping on the same string—that eternal purse-string!—still at the gold and the notes? If you go on at this rate, my good sir, you will never do any thing notable in the house-line. Take a lesson from Louis XIV. when he built Versailles;—that sovereign had at least this one good quality,—he had a supreme contempt for money;—it cost him a great deal no doubt, but it is "Versailles," nec pluribus impar;—why, it is a quarter of a mile long, and there is, or rather was, room in it to have lodged all the crowned heads of Europe, courts, ministers, guards, and all. Never stint yourself for space; the ground you build on is your own; it is only the extra brick and mortar;—the number of windows is not increased by stretching the plan out, the internal fittings are not an atom more expensive. Be at ease for once in your life, and cast about widely for room.

And now, dear sir, if you can but once remove this prejudice of cost from your mind, you may set at defiance all those twaddling architects who come to you with their theories of the "smallest spaces of support," and who would fain persuade you that, because it is scientific to build many rooms with few materials, therefore you ought to dwell in a house erected on such principles,—and that they ought to build it for you. You may send them all to the right-about with their one-sided contracted notions: is the house to be built for your sake or for theirs? who is going to inherit it—you or they? who is to find out all the comforts and discomforts of the mansion—the owner or the architect?—If you, then keep to your two stories and to the old English method of building your house round one or more courts. Go upon the old palatial, baronial, or collegiate plan; no matter what may be the style of architecture you adopt, this plan will be found suitable to any. The advantages of it are as follows: first of all, it gives you the opportunity of having your rooms all en suite, and yet not crowded together; next, it is more sociable for the inmates of a large country mansion to have the windows of their apartments looking partly inwards, as it were to the centre of the house, and partly outwards to the surrounding scenery: and thirdly, it requires and it gives the opportunity of having that most admirable and most useful appendage of any large mansion,—a cloister, or covered gallery, running round the whole interior of the court, either projecting from the plane of the walls—and, if so, becoming highly ornamental; or else formed within the walls, and, if so, giving an unusual degree of warmth and ventilation. In this damp and uncertain climate of ours, just consider how many days there are in the course of the year, when the ladies and the children of a family cannot stir out of doors, not even into the gardens; and then think of what a comfort it would be to have a dry and airy and elegant promenade and place of exercise within their own walls. Then the children may scamper about, if it be, a proper cloister external to the house, and make that joyous noise which is so essential to their health, without any fear of annoying even the most nervous of mammas. Within an instant they may all be under her own personal inspection, and yet they may have their perfect freedom. Here may the ladies of the family walk for hours on a wet day, and enjoy themselves without trouble, and with the facility of being at home again in a minute. If the court is well laid out as a flowery parterre, and the green-house is made to contribute its proper supply of plants to the cloister, it becomes converted into a kind of conservatory, and forms of itself an artificial or winter garden. Both a cloister, and an internal corridor with windows opening into the former, may very appropriately be constructed together, and then the accommodation of this plan is complete.

Whoever has lived in a cloistered and court-built house will know the convenient and comfortable feature we would here point out:—it is especially suited to the climate of England, and to the domestic habits of English families; it is one of the most ornamental features a house can possess; it gives great facilities to the waiting of the servants; it makes the house warm rather than cold; and it adds greatly to the comfort of the whole. As for the additional cost—let the cost be——! have we not entered our caveat against all such shabby pleas? Take this along with you, good sir,—do the thing well, or don't do it at all.