70 



Coincident with this disappearance of styles inside and 

 out, was a decay of manners as a fine art. We shall 

 have to study them anew. The younger sort have all 

 their own way, the older are not seen. 



A pretty style of house and ground was the old end- 

 wise house. Of these there were charming examples, 

 Judge White's, Mr. Bancroft's, Dr. Prince's and many 

 others. How sweet the grounds showed in front of them. 

 They were frank, and let the public into all the family en- 

 joyment and confidence. Many still remain, and they are 

 among the distinctive features of old towns. 



THE PORCHES are among the sweetest bits we can see now, 

 where they have not been altered or replaced, when they 

 are sure to be ruined. Not one has been added in modern 

 times that is not crude and shapeless. You might as well 

 attempt to alter an old table or chair of the good periods, 

 and give it another crook or design than what it has. The 

 sense was lost, and we wandered in a sterile vacancy of 

 design, and of heaviness and enrichment without beauty, 

 both as to house fronts and porches, window headings, fences, 

 roofs, doorways, and especially furniture, for fifty years. 

 Two old brick houses interest one. One entertained 

 Washington, (the late Mrs. Saunders remembered being 

 in the cotillion with him there), the house of Dr. Fiske. 

 Here the ground or base moulding told an architect the 

 other day it was the same period as one of the early halls 

 at Harvard College. The old Derby brick house in Derby 

 street is more like a bit of old England than anything in 

 the town. Beverly has charming bits. The refinement 

 of the old manner, the educated ornament delights one 

 precisely as old furniture does. It has an elegance, a 

 chasteness, a sobriety, a salience and reserve, not being 

 overloaded, a variety withal, that hold one by a kind of 

 spell of interest and fascination. The horror of later 

 thinsrs in wood had not arrived. We have been overrun 



