The result, it must be confessed, is not gratifying. For if you sometimes find a man who is satisfied with his own house, yet his neighbors sneer at it, and he at his neighbors' houses. And even with himself it does not usually wear well. The common case is that even he accepts it as a confessed failure, or at best a compromise. And if he does not confess the failure, (for association, pride, use-and-wont reconcile one to much), the house confesses it. For what else but self-confessed failures are these thin wooden or cheap brick walls, temporarily disguised as massive stone,--this roof, leaking from the snow-bank retained by the Gothic parapet, or the insufficient slope which the "Italian style" demands? There is no lack of endeavor to make the house look well. People will sacrifice almost anything to that. They will strive their chambers into the roof,--they will have windows where they do not want them, or leave them out where they do,--in our tropical summers they will endure the glare and heat of the sun, rather than that blinds should interfere with the moulded window-caps, or with the style generally,--they will break up the outline with useless and expensive irregularity,--they will have brackets that support nothing, and balconies and look-outs upon which no one ever steps after the carpenter leaves them,--all for the sake of pleasing the eye. And all this without any real and lasting success,--with a success, indeed, that seems often in an inverse ratio to the effort. If a man have a pig-stye to build, or a log-house in the woods, he may hit upon an agreeable outline; but let him set out freely and with all deliberation to build something that shall be beautiful, and he fails. Not that the failure is peculiar at all to us. In Europe there may, perhaps, be less bad taste,--though I am not sure of that; but there, and everywhere, I think, the memorable houses, among those of recent date, are not those carefully elaborated for effect,--the premeditated irregularity of the English Gothic, the trig regularity of the French Pseudo-Classic, or the studied rusticity of Germany,-- but such as seem to have grown of themselves out of the place where they stand,--Swiss _châlets_, Mexican or Manila plantation-houses, Italian farm-houses, built, nobody knows when or by whom, and built without any thought of attracting attention. And here I think we get a hint as to the reason of their success. For a house is not a monument, that it should seek to draw attention to itself,--but the dwelling-place of men upon the earth; and it must show itself to be wholly secondary to its purpose. We have had a good deal of exhortation lately, now getting rather wearisome, about avoiding pretence in architecture, and that we should let things show for what they are. The avoidance of pretence should begin farther back. If the house is _all_ pretence, we shall not help it by "frankness of treatment" in details.