The style of architecture in which the great majority of country houses, and very many town houses, from the cottage to the mansion, have been built during the past fifteen years, is a very great improvement upon the nameless mode—for which no better title could be invented than the “factory style”—which prevailed in house architecture during great part of last century and the first half of this. And it is a yet greater improvement upon the falsification of that simple though sordid way of building, by attempting to change its misery into magnificence by “compo” mockeries of stone construction and a style of ornament created to express the thickness of the wall or the weight of roof of a Renaissance palace. Most persons are contented with describing the improved mode as Old English, fancying that it is a real return to{155} the way in which houses were built in the reign of Elizabeth or James or thereabouts. But there is a notable distinction between ancient and modern “Old English.” It is this: the “variety” in form which is of the essence of the last was but the accident of the first. Whitehall and the Parthenon are not more simply symmetrical in their masses than are many of the finest specimens of Early English domestic architecture; and the “variety” which we moderns suppose we are copying is, in nearly all cases, either the result of change of plan in the process of building, or of subsequent additions by which the original symmetry was sacrificed. That the sacrifice was often without loss, and often even a gain—as such a sacrifice could never be in the case of a Greek or Renaissance building—is owing to the fact that domesticity is the central thought and expression of the one kind of architecture and public ostentation of the other. Accordingly, the keynote of an Early English house is its stack of chimneys, upon which it was considered impossible to lavish too much ornament. From the cottage of the Sussex labourer to the great nobleman’s mansion—such as that most exquisite of all existing specimens of Tudor building, “Compton in the Hole”—the chimneys are the things which first attract the eye and delight it longest; whereas the Greek, Roman, or Renais{156}sance house is heartily ashamed of its smoke, and has never yet succeeded thoroughly in dealing with its disgrace. Symmetry, then, in the old country house was looked upon as good; but convenience and comfort, and the expression of convenience and comfort, better. Now, in a house well and deliberately planned for the convenience of any household, large or small, the ground-plan and elevation will be naturally simple and symmetrical; simplicity, too, is economical, and economy a part of domesticity. Accordingly, the great Tudor mansions and palaces of England, the builders of which could have best afforded to pay for the supposed charm of “variety,” are, for the most part, the simplest in plan and elevation; while it is in the ill-planned and often-added-to village inn or rectory that the vagaries of “variety,” so alluring to the modern mind, are almost exclusively found.

In Old English architecture this variety is a very real though accidental beauty. It has the double charm of intensifying the primary expression of domesticity by the very sense of the sacrifice wh............