I do not know of a political economist, not excepting Henry George, who has had “the nerve,” shall I say, to attribute any of the blessings of civilization to war, pestilence and catastrophes. Yet, as nearly as a spectator may judge by effects, these direful things are all conducive to the greatest amount of comfort and ease of those who do not dwell too close to the points of friction. The swifter is dissolution, up to a certain ratio, at least, with the number of births, the greater the wealth, per capita, for the survivors. The survivors of the civil war who lived in the undevastated territory of the Northern States were largely a happy lot. It began to look for them as though God had decided to abolish the odds in favor of the bank, so to speak, and that life would be, henceforward, a square game affording everybody a chance to nibble at the crust of prosperity, not each one subject to gain only as another is bereft. Some inexorable condition appeared to have given way, for, at last, there was enough to go ’round--yes, more than enough; and with their surplus funds mounting higher and higher, these alarmingly prosperous people were much addicted to the erection of houses with “coopilows.” In the books of published designs which circulated at the period, dwelling-houses of this class were called “Italian villas,” although as we have come to know the Italian villa, especially since the art of photography has brought it to our intimate acquaintance, we fail to PLATE LVII. [Illustration: “I think that Dante’s more abstruse ecstatics meant to personify the mathematics,”--DON JUAN.] see any actual resemblance. The house with the cupola in America was, in effect, a newly-invented style or architecture of its era, no doubt suggested by the sumptuous villas of the Italian Renaissance, since they have always suggested prodigious opulence, and would naturally attract a people who had suddenly become rich. Besides, in no other style of building that I have seen could a dollar be made to make more show than in the cupola-house of our Reign of Terror. The art of pretentiousness was never better understood, and no art has responded more quickly to a popular demand.