ADVICE FOR LACKLAND. 75 



Fancy, if you can, a rural home, without its gate- 

 way lying all abroad upon a common 1 The great 

 charm of privacy is gone utterly ; and no device of 

 shrubbery, or hedge, can make good the loss of some 

 little wicket which will invite approach, and be a 

 barrier against too easy familiarity. The creak of 

 the gate-hinge is a welcome to the visitor, and as he 

 goes out, the latch clicks an adieu. 



But there are all sorts of gates, as there are all 

 sorts of welcomes ; there is, first, your inhospitable 

 one, made mostly, I should say, of matched boards, 

 with a row of pleasant iron spikes running along its 

 top, and no architectural decorations of pilaster or 

 panel can possibly remove its thoroughly inhospitable 

 aspect. It belongs to stable-courts or jail-yards, but 

 never to a home or to a garden. 



Again, there are your ceremonious gates, of open- 

 work indeed, but ponderous, and most times scrupu- 

 lously closed ; the very opening of them is a fatigu- 

 ing ceremonial, and there is nothing like a lively wel- 

 come in the dull clang of their ponderous latches. 



Next, there is your simple, unpretending, rural 

 gate, giving promise of unpretending rural beauties 

 homely in all its aspect, and giving foretaste of the 

 best of homeliness within. And I make a wide dis- 

 tinction here between the simple rurality at which I 

 have hinted, and that grotesqueness which is com- 



