It being one of our social necessities that our houses differ in size, we must pay some attention to their sides. Not giving them as decided a treatment as the front, but something compatible with a plain surface. And, above all, the principal cornice and roof lines should be carried round on the sides, at least as far as they can be seen. In some rare instances, where this has been done, it is astonishing to note the improved appearance and _finish_, that it gives. Did you ever consider the superior elegance of a corner house? Yet it is not so much the position as the fact that the position is taken advantage of. Being finished on both sides, it gives to the mind the idea of thickness as well as length and breadth. It is, in short, a _solid_, while the affair next door, overtopping it perhaps a story or two, is merely a _superficies_. But this is only a side thrust. Our 'commercial palaces' challenge the same criticism face to face. For the front, considered by itself even, is generally incomplete. A supposititious formula determines that the house must be in the Italian palace style, but the narrow lot forbidding an entire design, the builder, as he cannot put in all, puts in all he can, so that, instead of the house being a house, it is only a specimen slice of a palace. It has no particular beginning or middle or ending, and, with the long viscera of brickwork trailing off behind, it looks as if just wrenched out of the side of some Florentine or Genoese mansion. And, in very truth, is it not? The common cause of these errors and incongruities is our self-abasement to a style which depends for its effect upon continuous uniformity of design, while, from the very nature of our society, our houses must be diverse in size and pretension. We are a social people, it is true, but our individualities are strongly marked, and our dwellings, while designed with reference to each other, should never be too uniform. How frightful those white-shuttered brick piles which monotonize the streets of Philadelphia! But to assert its individuality the house need not shoot up like a vein of trap rock through a stratum of conglomerate: an American rises, not through the mass, but out of it. Have you ever seen a street view of Bruges or Nuremberg, those fantastic old cities of mediaeval Germany? You remember them, the tall gabled houses with projecting stories, the picturesque grouping of porch and gallery and oriel, the curious old bridges and the Gothic fountains, the grotesque carvings over the doorways, and the perfect population of dormer windows and turrets and lanterns. And did you not, _entre nous_, like it better than those stiff, formal views of the French and Italian cities? Was not the poetry more pleasing than the prose?