months; nor
do I think that the Continental nations in general _have_ the idea.
They would have advertised a "pretty" house or a "large" one, or a
"convenient" one; but they could not, by any use of the terms afforded
by their several languages, have got at the English "genteel." Consider,
a little, all the meanness that there is in that epithet, and then see,
when next you cross the Channel, how scornful of it that Calais spire
will look.

Sec. 5. Of which spire the largeness and age are also opposed exactly to
the chief appearances of modern England, as one feels them on first
returning to it; that marvellous smallness both of houses and scenery,
so that a ploughman in the valley has his head on a level with the tops
of all the hills in the neighborhood; and a house is organized into
complete establishment,--parlor, kitchen, and all, with a knocker to its
door, and a garret window to its roof, and a bow to its second story,[3]
on a scale of twelve feet wide by fifteen high, so that three such at
least would go into the granary of an ordinary Swiss cottage: and also
our serenity of perfection, our peace of conceit, everything being done
that vulgar minds can conceive as wanting to be done; the spirit of
well-principled housemaids everywhere, exerting itself for perpetual
propriety and renovation, so that nothing is old, but only
"old-fashioned," and contemporary, as it were, in date and
impressiveness only with last year's bonnets. Abroad, a building of the
eighth or tenth century stands ruinous in the open street; the children
play round it, the peasants heap their corn in it, the buildings of
yesterday nestle about it, and fit their new stones into its rents, and
tremble in sympathy as it trembles. No one wonders at it, or thinks of
it as separate, and of another time; we feel the ancient world to be a
real thing, and one with the new: antiquity is no dream; it is rather
the children playing about the old stones that are the dream. But all is
continuous; and the words, "from generation to generation,"
understandable there. Whereas here we have a living present, consisting
merely of what is "fashionable" and "old-fashioned;" and a past, of
which there are no vestiges; a past which peasant or citizen can no more
conceive; all equally far away; Queen Elizabeth as old as Queen
Boadicea, and both incredible. At Verona we look out of Can Grande's
window to his tomb; and if he does not stand beside us, we feel only
that he