A man now hires a bit of ground for eighty or ninety years; and, if he has something to spare to spend on beauty, he says to himself: “I will build me a house that will last my time, and what money I have over I will spend in decorating it. Why should I waste my means in raising wall and roof which will last five times as long as I or mine shall want them?” The answer is: Because that very “waste” is the truest and most striking ornament; and though you and your family’s usufruct of a house thus magnanimously built may be but a fifth of its natural age, there lies in that very fact an “ornament” of the most noble and touching kind, which will be obvious at all seasons to yourself and every beholder, though the consciousness of its cause may be dormant; whereas the meanness of your own plan will be only the more apparent with every penny you spend in making it meretricious. I have said that a modest _ostentation_ of extreme substantiality is also an element of architectural effect in the kind of building contemplated. This, indeed, is the properly architectural or artistic element. A house will look respectable, and something more than respectable, which has only the reality of being built somewhat better than well. But consciousness is the life of art, and there must be a quiet rejoicing in strength, solidity, and permanence, to give these characters that power over the imagination which a work of art must have. A labourer’s cottage or the smallest village church which has this character is an artistic and rightly architectural work; and the nobleman’s mansion or the cathedral which wants it is not. Here comes in that true “decoration” which scarcely the humblest house of the sixteenth or early part of the seventeenth century was altogether without. In out-of-the-way villages and roadside inns of that period, you will find your attention directed to the thickness and weight of the roof-timbers by a carved or moulded cornice, which measures and expatiates upon the depth and substance of the rafters which terminate therein; or one or more of the brackets supporting the joists of the overhanging bedroom floor will have a touch of carving, to declare with what ease and pleasure the burthen is borne upon their sturdy shoulders; or the lintel of the door will show and boast of the thickness of the wall by a moulded chamfer. A single touch of such decoration glorifies the whole, and puts the living spirit of art into the body of an honest building, however humble it may be.