HOUSE AND GARDEN 
357 
gesting marble; another has a coat of 
sanded plaster mixed with a yellow ochre, 
so the wall is a clear pale buff. Paper 
printed in colors was imported from Eng¬ 
land, but rarely used and then only in the 
most important rooms of the more formal 
houses. In general it copied the frescoes of 
the time—Watteau shepherds and shep¬ 
herdesses, landscapes, or Japanese tea-gar¬ 
dens. Records tell of sending to England 
the exact dimensions of the rooms with 
doors and windows and the paper being 
printed to order. 
Of course everything from England was 
highly prized and though after the War of 
the Revolution they strenuously denied it, 
still English buildings and English furni¬ 
ture retained complete influence over every¬ 
thing constructed by the new nation. Per¬ 
haps we are prone to give too much credit 
to the esthetic taste of the day ; probably the 
excellence of the average work was purely 
due to tradition. They were accustomed to 
the regular arrangement of windows, to 
roofs sloping at just a certain angle, to the 
delicate plaster cornices and mantels 
of Adam and his contemporaries; it 
never occurred to them to design dif¬ 
ferently. Then too, each village car¬ 
penter had one of the various hand¬ 
books on building that gave the “five 
orders” complete in every detail, as 
well as chimney-pieces and stairways 
with working drawings of the newels 
and just how to sweep the handrail 
around in a curve mathematically 
correct. 
I have before me now the “Palla¬ 
dio Londonensis, or London Art of 
Building,” dated 1748 and written by 
a certain William Salmon for “the 
young Practitioners.” The title-page Ai 
describes how it contains “plain and 
easy Directions for the construction of the 
Five Orders of Architecture with their sev¬ 
eral Pedistals, Columns, and Entablatures; 
and a Parallel drawn between this and Mr. 
Gibbs’s Method and that of the Builder’s 
Repository.. .A large variety of Doors. . . 
the proportion of Windows.. .the propor¬ 
tion of rooms, ceiling-pieces, &c. . .the sev¬ 
eral kinds of Staircases, with the various 
forms of their twisted Rails...,” and so 
forth. 
If it ever occurred to a builder to range 
four or five windows close together, or build 
a corner fireplace, or to commit any of the 
modern house’s frivolities, it was doubtless 
frowned upon as not according to the books 
and therefore ignorantly “Gothick,” as they 
expressed it. 
Among the gentry a knowledge of formal, 
classic architecture was an essential part of 
a man’s education. Washington and Jef¬ 
ferson were skilled architects and each has 
half-a-dozen or more extremely admirable 
mansions to his credit. Rigid conventional¬ 
Spindle-back Windsor chairs, the Franklin stove and the clock that ticket the seconds of 
the past century 
ism founded on English work of the 
eighteenth century produced the style 
called “Colonial”; probably the coun¬ 
try builders then had as little archi¬ 
tectural sense as they have to-day, only 
the buildings they saw were better and 
they were not further degraded by 
such books as are issued bv unqualified 
“authorities.” But “revenons a nos 
moutons.” 
Most of the furniture here is well 
worth remark — the inlaid Hepple- 
white sideboard with its old cut-glass 
and silver, the mirrored console of the 
parlour with seven-branched candle- 
(Continued on page 386) 
inlaid Hepplewhite sideboard with its silver and 
glass of long ago 
A front corner of the parlour, with the fine old secretary, the console table and the mirrors 
that were so freely and effectively used in the olden times 
