206 RURAL ARCHITECTURE. 



no little moment to them, to avail themselves of every possible im- 

 provement in the manner of constructing their dwellings, so as to 

 secure the largest amount of comfort, convenience, and beauty, for 

 the moderate sum which an American landholder has to spend. 

 While the rural proprietors of the other continent are often content 

 to live in the same houses, and with the same inconveniences as 

 their forefathers, no one in our time and country, who has any of 

 the national spirit of progress in him, is satisfied unless, in building 

 a new house, he has some of the "modern improvements" in it. 



This is a good sign of the times ; and when we see it coupled 

 with another, viz., the great desire to make the dwelling agreeable 

 and ornamental as well as comfortable, we think there is abundant 

 reason to hope, so far as the country is concerned, that something 

 like a national taste will come in due time. 



What the popular taste in building seems to us to require, just 

 now, is not so much impulse as right direction. There are number- 

 less persons who have determined, in building their new home in 

 the country, that they " will have something pretty ;" but precisely 

 what character it shall have, and whether there is any character, 

 beyond that of a "pretty cottage" or a "splendid house," is not 

 perhaps very clear to their minds. 



We do not make this statement to find fault with the condition 

 of things ; far from it. We see too much good in the newly awak- 

 ened taste for the Beautiful, to criticize severely its want of intelli- 

 gence as to the exact course it should take to achieve its object or 

 perhaps its want of definiteness as to what that object is beyond 

 providing an agreeable home. But we allude to it to show that, 

 with a little direction, the popular taste now awakened in this par- 

 ticular department, may develop itself in such a manner as to pro- 

 duce the most satisfactory and beautiful results. 



Fifteen years ago there was but one idea relating to a house in 

 the country. It must be a Grecian temple. Whether twenty feet 

 or two hundred feet front, it must have its columns and portico. 

 There might be comfortable rooms behind them or not ; that was a 

 matter which the severe taste of the classical builder could not stoop 

 to consider. The roof might be so flat that there was no space 

 for comfortable servants' bedrooms, or the attic so hot that the second 



