House Garden 
account of their planning, so that it has become 
a favorite recreation of students of Roman 
archaeology to attempt their restoration from 
these descriptions. But the wide variety of 
these restorations proves how vain is the ex¬ 
pectation of precise and accurate results from 
descriptions written 
in the familiar style 
of personal corre¬ 
spondence, without 
any effort at techni¬ 
cal precision of de¬ 
tail. Dimensions, 
numbers, decora¬ 
tive detail, architec¬ 
tural features are 
alike wanting from 
these letters, to 
illustrate whose 
style a brief quota¬ 
tion will suffice. 
* * * “ Behind 
is a quadrangle, a 
portico and a lesser 
court; then again a 
portico, and then a vestibule, beyond which 
woods are seen, and at a greater distance, 
mountains. On the left hand of the dining¬ 
room, a little farther from the shore, is a very 
large parlour, within that a smaller withdraw¬ 
ing room, which has one window looking to 
the east, another to the west. Joining to this 
angle is a room in an elliptic torm ; a shape 
that allows us from the several windows to 
enjoy the benefit of the sun during the whole 
course of the day ; and the walls of it are so 
contrived as to hold books,” etc. 1 Obviously 
i The letters of Pliny the Younger, tram, by John, Earl of Orrery ; 
I, 149-150, London, 1752. 
here is no architectural specification upon 
which to base a drawing. 
The analogies upon which we must depend 
for our restorations of Roman country- 
houses are of three kinds. There are, first, 
the existing ruins of Roman buildings, both 
domestic and 
public. These 
acquaint us fully 
with the methods 
of construction and 
the common archi¬ 
tectural features of 
ancient Roman 
times. We have, 
secondly, certain 
types of Italian 
country houses and 
f a r m buildings 
which, it seems not 
unlikely, have pre¬ 
served to this late 
day traditions 
handed down from 
a great antiquity. 
And in the third place, there are many repre¬ 
sentations of villas and country houses in 
paintings upon the walls of extant ruins in 
Rome and Pompeii, and occasionally also in 
the details of reliefs preserved in the various 
museums of Europe. It is the similarity 
between many of those representations and 
familiar types of rustic buildings encountered 
by the tourist on the roads about Rome and 
sometimes in Tuscany, that warrants the belief 
that the rural architecture of Italy has changed 
little from that of antique times. 
There was probably a wide range of archi¬ 
tectural character in the villas of even the 
Fig. IV-GATE-LIKE STRUCTURE AND AEDICULE 
From Paintings in the Baths of Titus 
From Pompeiian tVall Paintings 
7 
