No style of domestic architecture can be good or partake of "high-art" qualities that cannot be claimed as a true exponent of the family and social life of the period to which it owes its birth and development. A whimsical fashion in dress, in equipages, or in the etiquette of society may be tolerated without injury to the national advancement. Such fashions are transitory, springing suddenly into notice and as rapidly passing into oblivion. With architecture it is different: here follies are wrought into durable form. We see an ultra Queen Anne house of to-day, and its quaintness and odd conceits attract our fancy. We put up with its manifest incongruities and inconveniences, and for a time all goes well. But when we tire of four-by-four-inch fenestration, glazed with rough cathedral-glass, the lines of the tower several inches off the vertical and bulged in the centre to give the effect of age, the rough and massive walls--of lath and plaster--glittering with broken glass, the ceilings so low that we are unable to have chandeliers to light our rooms, rendered gloomy by artificially-darkened walls and panelling, what are we to do? If the house is well built, it should be in better heart and condition one hundred years hence than the colonial mansions erected prior to 1760 are to-day. These colonial mansions, planned and built for the wealthy merchants of the seaboard towns, may well command our admiration and careful study, but, as a rule, they are entirely unsuited to the domestic life of to-day, and their construction is faulty and badly conceived when viewed in the light of modern practice. They should be respected and studied, because they are true exponents of art-building, in that they show in every line and moulding good common sense,--the use of materials according to the best ability and knowledge possessed by the artisans who erected them, and a sturdy manhood which wrought by main strength artistic works out of crude materials with slender mechanical appliances. A study of these old buildings seems to bring before us something of the mental strength of the men who erected them,--men who were fully up to and even ahead of their time, who aimed to do their best, and what they did was good. Such being the case, are we to suppose that had the colonial architects and builders continued in practice down to our own time they would have gone on in the old way, or, rather, behind their own best period of construction to the time when beams were hewn out with an axe and left as large as possible, to reduce the labor to a minimum? No; they were too advanced in sentiment for such weakness, and would no doubt ere this have developed a sensible and correct national style of domestic building, founded upon colonial precedent, but taking into consideration all the advances in science and art and, above all, machinery, which, although decried by the "high-art" amateur, has done much to improve the art and science of American building.