d, and sophisticated
man should never seem to have sprouted from the clods. It should rather
be an expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish
life. Since the days of William Morris that's a fact which we in England
have been unable to comprehend. Civilised and sophisticated men have
solemnly played at being peasants. Hence quaintness, arts and crafts,
cottage architecture, and all the rest of it. In the suburbs of our
cities you may see, reduplicated in endless rows, studiedly quaint
imitations and adaptations of the village hovel. Poverty, ignorance,
and a limited range of materials produced the hovel, which possesses
undoubtedly, in suitable surroundings, its own 'as it were titanic'
charm. We now employ our wealth, our technical knowledge, our rich
variety of materials for the purpose of building millions of imitation
hovels in totally unsuitable surroundings. Could imbecility go further?"

Henry Wimbush took up the thread of his interrupted discourse. "All that
you say, my dear Scogan," he began, "is certainly very just, very true.
But whether Sir Ferdinando shared your views about architecture or if,
indeed, he had any views about architecture at all, I very much doubt.
In building this house, Sir Ferdinando was, as a matter of fact,
preoccupied by only one thought--the proper placing of his privies.
Sanitation was the one great interest of his life. In 1573 he even
published, on this subject, a little book--now extremely scarce--called,
'Certaine Priuy Counsels' by 'One of Her Maiestie's Most Honourable
Priuy Counsels, F.L. Knight', in which the whole matter is treated with
great learning and elegance. His guiding principle in arranging the
sanitation of a house was to secure that the greatest possible distance
should separate the privy from the sewage arrangements. Hence it
followed inevitably that the privies were to be placed at the top of the
house, being connected by vertical shafts with pits or channels in the
ground. It must not be thought that Sir Ferdinando was moved only by
material and merely sanitary considerations; for the placing of his
privies in an exalted position he had also certain excellent spiritual
reasons. For, he argues in the third chapter of his 'Priuy Counsels',
the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying them
we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe.
To counteract these degrading effects he advised that the privy sho