300 HOW TO MAKE A COUNTRY PLACE 



son and often imitated in somewhat gingerbread fashion by mediocre 

 followers, has many advocates, as well as the Gothic of the Thirteenth 

 to the Sixteenth Centuries, sometimes called one man stone work 

 when compared with the megalithic masonry of Italy, Greece and 

 Egypt and rivaling in beauty the Neoclassic of later date. In the 

 Eighteenth Century Dame Architecture slept the sleep of the just, 

 this being the nadir of architecture as the "Seventh Century was the 

 nadir of the human mind," so absolutely without individuality was 

 the period save for an occasional return to the Renaissance of France 

 and Italy and to the classic grafted on the Colonial which, with high 

 pillared fronts and Pantheon entablatures, graced many a country 

 side. In America, in the middle of the Nineteenth Century came the 

 upheaval of every known type ; an agglomeration at times of a falderal 

 of ideas jumbled into a veritable grab bag in which village carpenter 

 ignoring the fact that it takes at least twenty-five trades to build a 

 real house and inexperienced architect delved and brought forth, 

 among others, the square, cupola-crowned country house and the 

 Gothic cottage with head hitting ceilings and jig-saw embellishments. 



Then came radical changes. The tide of departure from and 

 decadence of the dignified Colonial set in, and a wave of Queen 

 Anne of far away Gothic parentage swept over our land, interiors 

 embellished and finished in varied styles, including the Eastlake and 

 later the doweled and keyed Mission. Dissatisfaction was the inevit- 

 able result of these nondescript productions, and architects in the 

 search for something more beautiful again turned to the Colonial 

 and the coeval English Georgian, and in combination with the Queen 

 Anne, evolved many examples of rare beauty, the beginning of a 

 real apotheosis in American architecture. The grander houses were 

 replicas of Italian, French or Dutch Renaissance a broad mantle, 

 covering an occasional sin or again, Tudor, Jacobean, Elizabethan 

 or Victorian asserted its influence ; the latter, often overloaded with 

 inartistic decoration, fields wherein many a gimcrack creation, the 

 outcome of architectural revel license, today horrifies the beholder, 

 or later the period when the suburban builder seized with avidity 

 upon the Mansard, which has the single redeeming merit of chang- 

 ing low-eaved attic rooms to those of high ceilings and semi-perpen- 

 dicular walls. 



The limitations of unlimited wealth, aggressively self-evident 

 when unguided by knowledge, are sometimes responsible for much that 

 is bizarre, incomplete, and uncomfortable in the house building field. 

 The small man of large means, to save a few dollars will often 

 ignorantly vandalize the finest conception to the extent of thousands. 

 His only safety is to leave it to that architect who really knows, and 

 pay the bills without grumbling. 



