It is surprising that, among these fantastic systems of physiognomy, that easy and natural one should never have been set on foot, which might connect the structural efforts of individuals with the cast of their minds and feelings. To do this would be especially easy in new countries, where nearly every one is compelled to build his own abode, and where, for the most part, there is so little of architectural solidity that habitations seldom last for above a generation, and even he who inherits a house inherits but a ruin. Thus the simplicity of Patrick Henry's habits and tastes might be inferred from the primitiveness of his dwelling. You might have guessed his unambitiousness from the absence about his home of any thing that betrayed a longing for grandeur. All was plain, substantial, good; nothing ostentatious or effeminate. The master's personal desires coveted nothing beyond rural abundance and comforts--such blessings as are quite enough to make private life happy and preserve it uncorrupt. In all this you might discern the public man who cherished, as a politician, no visions, no novelties; sought, of course, to build up for his fellow-citizens no other nor better happiness than such as crowned all his own wishes; believed little in pomp and greatness; loved our old hereditary laws, manners, liberties, victuals; and dreaded French principles and dishes as alike contaminating and destructive. Man, as we have already intimated, is a constructive animal. He alone is properly such. For the inferior creatures that build do so upon a single, instinctive, invariable method, always using the same material; he, rationally and inventively, as outward circumstances may require, or as, when these constrain him little, his individual fancy, desires, or judgment may prompt. In the nomadic state a tent of skins, a lodge of bark, are the sole structures for shelter that fit his wandering life; and the rudeness of these invites to no decoration, while convenience itself forbids all diversity of contrivance for him, who, paying no ground-rent, may decamp to-morrow; and, bound by no leasehold, may carry his tenement with him, like that travelling landlord, Master Snail, or abandon it like that lodger by the season, Dame Bird. In short, he comes not under the terms of zoological or botanical description, as having a _habitat_; under the line he lives, as did father Adam and mother Eve (whose housekeeping in Eden, Milton so well relates), in a bower of rose and myrtle; at the pole, he burrows beneath the snow or makes his masonry of ice; in Idumea, he dwells, like its lions, in a cavern; on the Maranon, he perches his house in a tree-top, and his young ones--plumeless bipeds though they be--nestle among the feathered denizens of the mid-air; in certain mining regions, he is born and dies hundreds of fathoms under ground, and perhaps never sees the light of day; in Naples, he lives, as do the dogs and cats of Constantinople, in the streets.