The common mistake in our houses is, that they are designed, as inexperienced persons choose their paper-hangings, to be something of themselves, and not as mere background, as they should be. Thus it is that people seek to beautify their houses by ornamenting them, as a vulgar person sticks himself over with jewelry. A man's house is only a wider kind of dress; and as we do not call a man well-dressed when we are forced to see his dress before we see him, so a house cannot be satisfactory when it isolates itself from its inmates and from the landscape. In such houses, the more _effort_ the worse they are; they may cheat us for the moment, but the oftener we see them the less we like them. Does not the uncomfortable sensation with which fine houses so often oppress us arise from the vague feeling that the owner has built himself out of his house, and his house out of the landscape? Hence it is mostly the novices that build the fine houses. A man of sense, I think, will generally build his second house plainer than his first. Not that he desires, perhaps, any the less what he desired before, but he is more alive to the difficulties and to the cost, and takes refuge in the safety of a lower scale. His experience has taught him that where he succeeded best he was really farthest from the end he sought. The fine house requires that its accessories should be in kind. All things within and without, the approach, the grounds, the furniture, must be brought up to the same pitch, and kept there. And when all is done, it is not done, but forever demands retouching. What is got in this kind cannot be paid for with money, nor finished once for all, but is a never-sated absorbent of time, thought, life. And it attacks the owner, too; he must conform, in his dress, his equipage, and his habits generally; he must be as fine as his house. The nicer his taste the more any incongruity will offend him, and the greater the danger of his becoming more or less an appendage to his house. Much of that chronic ailment of our society, the "trials of housekeeping," is traceable to this source. This is a complicated trouble, and probably other causes have their share in it. But we cannot fail to recognize in these seemingly accidental obstructions a stern, but beneficent adjustment of our circumstances to enforce a simplicity which we should else neglect. One cannot greatly deprecate the terrors of high rents and long bills, and the sufferings from clumsy and careless domestics, if they help to keep down senseless profusion and display.