OLD HOUSES. 403 



principal attraction in some of our old winding roads, and 

 they are remembered in connection with many delightful 

 rural excursions. The rage that has possessed the sons 

 of the original occupants of these cottages for putting 

 up pasteboard imitations of something existing partly in 

 romance and partly in the imagination of the designer, 

 has destroyed the rurality of many scenes in our old 

 country villages. 



Any marks of pretension, or of striving after something 

 beyond the supposed circumstances of the occupants of 

 a house, are disagreeable to the spectator. Could the 

 sons of the old-fashioned people who occupy plain dwell- 

 ings have labored to preserve their simplicity and rustic 

 expression, combined with a purer style of architecture, 

 the effect would have been exceedingly pleasing. They 

 have done the very opposite of this. Ambitious to ex- 

 clude from their houses everything that would be re- 

 motely suggestive of the simple habits of rural life, they 

 have endeavored to make them look as much as possible, 

 with one hundredth part of the cost, like the villa of a 

 nobleman. So many of these ambitious cottages have 

 been reared on many of our old roads, as to have entirely 

 destroyed that picturesque beauty which made almost 

 every route a pleasant landscape. The road, once covered 

 on all sides with those rural scenes that charm every 

 lover of the country, has become as tame as one of those 

 new-made roads, laid out by speculators on devastated 

 ground, to be sold in lots under the hammer of the 

 auctioneer. 



The New England people have been repeatedly char- 

 acterized as wanting in taste ; and this deficiency is 

 supposed to be exemplified in the entire absence of 

 ornamental work about our old houses and their enclos- 

 ures. It is a maxim that a person who is deficient in 

 taste always runs to an extreme in the use of ornaments, 



