And now, dear sir, if you can but once remove this prejudice of cost from your mind, you may set at defiance all those twaddling architects who come to you with their theories of the "smallest spaces of support," and who would fain persuade you that, because it is scientific to build many rooms with few materials, _therefore_ you ought to dwell in a house erected on such principles,--and that they ought to build it for you. You may send them all to the right-about with their one-sided contracted notions: is the house to be built for _your_ sake or for _theirs_? who is going to inherit it--you or they? who is to find out all the comforts and discomforts of the mansion--the owner or the architect?--If _you_, then keep to your two stories and to the old English method of building your house round one or more courts. Go upon the old palatial, baronial, or collegiate plan; no matter what may be the style of architecture you adopt, this plan will be found suitable to any. The advantages of it are as follows: first of all, it gives you the opportunity of having your rooms all _en suite_, and yet not crowded together; next, it is more sociable for the inmates of a large country mansion to have the windows of their apartments looking partly inwards, as it were to the centre of the house, and partly outwards to the surrounding scenery: and thirdly, it requires and it gives the opportunity of having that most admirable and most useful appendage of any large mansion,--a cloister, or covered gallery, running round the whole interior of the court, either projecting from the plane of the walls--and, if so, becoming highly ornamental; or else formed within the walls, and, if so, giving an unusual degree of warmth and ventilation. In this damp and uncertain climate of ours, just consider how many days there are in the course of the year, when the ladies and the children of a family cannot stir out of doors, not even into the gardens; and then think of what a comfort it would be to have a dry and airy and elegant promenade and place of exercise within their own walls. Then the children may scamper about, if it be, a proper cloister external to the house, and make that joyous noise which is so essential to their health, without any fear of annoying even the most nervous of mammas. Within an instant they may all be under her own personal inspection, and yet they may have their perfect freedom. Here may the ladies of the family walk for hours on a wet day, and enjoy themselves without trouble, and with the facility of being at home again in a minute. If the court is well laid out as a flowery parterre, and the green-house is made to contribute its proper supply of plants to the cloister, it becomes converted into a kind of conservatory, and forms of itself an artificial or winter garden. Both a cloister, and an internal corridor with windows opening into the former, may very appropriately be constructed together, and then the