try, but not the piety, of the pagan. Our God is a household
God, as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in every man's
dwelling; let men look to it when they rend it lightly and pour out its
ashes. It is not a question of mere ocular delight, it is no question
of intellectual pride, or of cultivated and critical fancy, how, and
with what aspect of durability and of completeness, the domestic
buildings of a nation shall be raised. It is one of those moral duties,
not with more impunity to be neglected because the perception of them
depends on a finely toned and balanced conscientiousness, to build our
dwellings with care, and patience, and fondness, and diligent
completion, and with a view to their duration at least for such a
period as, in the ordinary course of national revolutions, might be
supposed likely to extend to the entire alteration of the direction of
local interests. This at the least; but it would be better if, in every
possible instance, men built their own houses on a scale commensurate
rather with their condition at the commencement, than their attainments
at the termination, of their worldly career; and built them to stand as
long as human work at its strongest can be hoped to stand; recording to
their children what they had been, and from what, if so it had been
permitted them, they had risen. And when houses are thus built, we may
have that true domestic architecture, the beginning of all other, which
does not disdain to treat with respect and thoughtfulness the small
habitation as well as the large, and which invests with the dignity of
contented manhood the narrowness of worldly circumstance.

I look to this spirit of honourable, proud, peaceful self-possession,
this abiding wisdom of contented life, as probably one of the chief
sources of great intellectual power in all ages, and beyond dispute as
the very primal source of the great architecture of old Italy and
France. To this day, the interest of their fairest cities depends, not
on the isolated richness of palaces, but on the cherished and exquisite
decoration of even the smallest tenements of their proud periods. The
most elaborate piece of architecture in Venice is a small house at the
head of the Grand Canal, consisting of a ground floor with two storeys
above, three windows in the first, and two in the second. Many of the
most exquisite buildings are on the narrower canals, and of no larger
dimensions. One of the most interesting pieces