First of all, then, with regard to the plans best suited for the country residences of the nobility and gentry of England--of that high-minded and highly gifted aristocracy, which is the peculiar ornament of this island,--of that solid honest squirearchy, which shall be the sheet-anchor of the nation, after all our commercial gents, with their ephemeral prosperity, shall have disappeared from the surface of the land, and have been forgotten,--the plan of a house best suited for the "Fine old English Gentleman;" and we really do not care to waste our time in considering the convenience and the taste of any that do not rank with this class of men. It is absurd for any of the worthy members of that truly noble and generous class of men, to try to erect reminiscences of Italy, or any other southern clime, amid their own "tall ancestral groves" at home, here in old England. They have every right in the world to inhabit the palaces of Italy, which many a needy owner is glad to find them tenanting; they cannot but admire the noble proportions, the solid construction, the magnificent decorations, which meet their eyes on every side, whether at Genoa, at Verona, at Venice, at Florence, or at Rome. But it by no means follows, that what looks so beautiful, and is so truly elegant and suitable on the Lake of Como, will preserve the same qualities when erected on the banks of Windermere; those lovely villas that overlook the _Val d'Arno_, and where one could be content to spend the rest of one's days, with Petrarch and Boccacio, and Dante, and Michael Angelo, and Raffaelle, will not bear transplanting either to Richmond or Malvern. The climate and the sky and the earth of Tuscany and Piedmont, are not those of Gloucestershire and Warwickshire; what may be very harmonious in form and colour when contrasted with the objects of that country which produced it, may have the most disagreeable effect, and be excessively inconvenient, in another region with which it has no relation. Not that the proportions of style and the execution of detail may not be reproduced in England, if sufficient taste and money be applied,--but that all surrounding things are out of harmony with the very idea and existence of the building. The vegetable world is different: the external and internal qualities of the soil jar with the presence of the foreign-looking mansion. An English garden is not, nor can be, an Italian one; an English terrace can never be made to look like an Italian one; those very effects of light and shade on which the architect counted when he made his plans and elevations, are not to be attained under an English sky. The house, however closely it may be taken from the last Palazzo its noble owner lived in, will only be a poor-looking copy after all; and he will wonder, as he paces through its corridors and halls, or views it from every point of the compass on the outside, what can be the cause of such a failure of his hopes? He hoped