46 
DWELLINGS, OUTBUILDINGS, 
cottage or mansion. If the reader contemplates building a house, 
we pray him to lose no time in obtaining and carefully reading 
some of these works; and if he finds in them a plan and exte¬ 
rior that meet his wants, let him entrust no illiterate carpenter 
with their execution, but employ some competent architect, who 
will furnish all the drawings, not only of the dwelling itself, but 
of the stable and all the outbuildings. There is no better evi¬ 
dence of a vulgar taste, or an exhausted purse, than to see dwell¬ 
ings of some architectural pretension and expensive finish, with 
rude outbuildings, having no resemblance in style to the house, and 
seeming, by their incongruity, to say to every passer—“You see 
we are but poor relations.” Decorating the street-front of the 
house only, or robbing the outbuildings to add finery to the dwell¬ 
ing, belongs to the same class of mistakes as that of the ostrich, 
which, in flying from danger, seeks a place in which to thrust its 
head only, and there thinks itself safe and unseen. Do not our 
friends, who think their outbuildings of little importance, reveal 
their foolishness in the same way ? 
There is an unfortunate tendency among our countrymen who 
are building houses, to be willing victims of some fashionable 
mania pertaining to architectural styles; so that different eras of 
style in domestic architecture can be distinctly traced throughout 
our country by a multitude of examples of what were, in their day, 
called houses in “the classic styles,” and their Doric, Ionic, and 
Corinthian varieties ; houses in “ the Gothic style,” with its rustic 
Norman, Tudor, Elizabethan, and Castellated varieties; houses in 
“ the Italian style,” with bracketed, Romanesque, Lombard and 
Swiss varieties ; and lastly, those least grotesque, but often clumsy 
forms for small houses, “ the French or Mansard-roof style ; ”—a 
title that does not even assume to designate a style of architecture 
for an entire house, but fore-dooms a dwelling to be designed for 
the purpose of sustaining a certain fashionable hood of roofs. 
Hardly do we begin to adapt one style or another to our needs in 
building, with a tolerable degree of fitness and good taste, before 
some supposed new style, or novel feature of an old style, intrudes 
itself as “the fashion,” and straightway builders throughout the 
breadth of our land vie with each other in numberless caricatures 
