matter of course: it is taken for granted both by those who witness it and by those who possess it. It is transmuted money. There is no poetry; if hearts are moved by it, it is not in that fashion or to that issue that it touches them. Quite different is it with the humble home. There every object seems to have a pleasing history. The care that is taken of it tells you how hard it had been come by. You read in it a little tale of the labour, the frugality, the self-denial expended on its acquisition. It is a revelation of an inner life which you are the better for contemplating and sympathizing with' (Rev. F. Barham Zincke).
Many proprietors have spent large sums in what they think, and certainly intend to be, the improvement of small cottage property on their estates; but in the great majority of cases they, like the societies, have only made a change of evil. Our old houses were constructed well, according to the habits of the people, and allowing for the state of sanitary science at the time. Thus, when a conflagration was required to clear the wealthy town of London of the plague, the cottages of labouring men would hardly have attained to hygienic excellence. They were, however, built to live in, and the working men who planned and built them made the comfort, as they understood it, of the inmates their sole aim. The outer walls were thick, the openings small; the thatch was ample, thick, and overhanging, keeping out both heat and cold, and throwing off the rain. The rooms were tolerably large, but low: in those days height would probably appear to labouring men uncomfortable, and would in winter seem to make the rooms feel cold. Their betters, if they did submit to loftier, larger rooms, had canopies and screens, and had contrived the four-post bed with heavy curtains to obtain the necessary closeness. In those times the country cottager resembled his superiors in folly and in sense; but now he has no architectural individuality at all: the labourer has no personal control or interest in the building of his house. Some inexperienced draughtsman plans a
