St. Thomas Aquinas writes, “Great riches are not required for the habit of magnificence; it is enough that a man should dispose of such as he possesses greatly, according to time and place.” As in life, so in art, and especially in architecture, greatness of style is quite independent of wealth of material; indeed, wealth of material is constantly found by true artists to be a fatal hindrance to grandeur of effect. Hence great poets and painters are usually very shy of what commonly pass for great subjects--that is, subjects full of obvious interest and splendour; and, if they treat such subjects at all, they begin by denuding them as far as possible of all that makes them attractive to the novice in art, until they come to a simple greatness which was hitherto a secret. Now I wish to point out what I conceive to be a principal condition of great effect with small means and in small or comparatively small buildings. It is magnificence in the expenditure of such material as the architect possesses, and especially of stone, brick, and timber. It is commonly supposed, even by architects, that a solidity of wall and roof sufficient to put far out of sight any idea of insecurity or decay, if properly shown forth and expressed by chamfer, moulding, cornice, shafted recess, and the many other “decorations” which are principally methods of showing the thickness of wall and weight of roof, is all that noble building calls for; and that the frequent--nay, general--practice of ancient architecture in going much further than this was simply waste of material caused by want of mechanical knowledge. But those who know most of ancient architecture know best that there was no want of mechanical knowledge displayed in it, but quite the reverse. Not only is mechanical knowledge, equal if not beyond our own, proved by such buildings as York and Salisbury Cathedrals, but the house and cottage builder of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seems to have known all the details of his business fully as well as the most ingenious economist of material that ever “scamped” a modern tenement of the same order. He was fully aware that the strength of a rafter lay rather in its depth than its breadth, and that, for a time at least, a few boards two inches thick and ten inches deep, set edgeways, would suffice to carry the roof, which nevertheless it pleased him better to lay upon a succession of beams ten inches square. It is the reality, and the modest ostentation of the reality, of such superfluous substantiality that constitutes the whole secret of effect in many an old house that strikes us as “architectural” though it may not contain a single item of architectural ornament; and, in the very few instances in which modern buildings have been raised in the same fashion, the beholder at once feels that their generous regard for the far future is of almost as poetical a character as the aged retrospect of a similar house of the time of Henry VII or Elizabeth.