“Indeed! I don’t pretend to be a connoisseur or conoscenti myself; but I’m told the style is undeniably modern. And was not I lucky, Juliana, not to let that _Medona_ be knocked down to me? I was just going to bid, when I heard such smart bidding; but, fortunately, the auctioneer let out that it was done by a very old master--a hundred years old. Oh! your most obedient, thinks I!--if that’s the case, it’s not for my money: so I bought this, in lieu of the smoke-dried thing, and had it a bargain.” In architecture, Mrs. Raffarty had as good a taste and as much skill as in painting. There had been a handsome portico in front of the house: but this interfering with the lady’s desire to have a viranda, which she said could not he dispensed with, she had raised the whole portico to the second story, where it stood, or seemed to stand, upon a tarpaulin roof. But Mrs. Raffarty explained, that the pillars, though they looked so properly substantial, were really hollow and as light as feathers, and were supported with cramps, without _disobliging_ the front wall of the house at all to signify. Before she showed the company any farther, she said, she must premise to his lordship, that she had been originally stinted in room for her improvements, so that she could not follow her genius liberally; she had been reduced to have some things on a confined scale, and occasionally to consult her pocket-compass; but she prided herself upon having put as much into a tight pattern as could well be; that had been her whole ambition, study, and problem; for she was determined to have at least the honour of having a little _taste_ of every thing at Tusculum. So she led the way to a little conservatory, and a little pinery, and a little grapery, and a little aviary, and a little pheasantry, and a little dairy for show, and a little cottage for ditto, with a grotto full of shells, and a little hermitage full of earwigs, and a little ruin full of looking-glass, “to enlarge and multiply the effect of the Gothic.”--“But you could only put your head in, because it was just fresh painted, and though there had been a fire ordered in the ruin all night, it had only smoked.” In all Mrs. Raffarty’s buildings, whether ancient or modern, there was a studied crookedness. Yes, she said, she hated every thing straight, it was so formal and _unpicturesque_. “Uniformity and conformity,” she observed, “had their day; but now, thank the stars of the present day, irregularity and deformity bear the bell, and have the majority.”