abs as can be
conveniently worked, and as may be suitable to the framing,--least of
all with tiles.

"But, good Lord! what ideas you have got of expense! Why, sir, do you
know that such a house would cost a great deal of money! and besides
this, I am almost certain that in ancient Rome, the houses had quite
flat roofs, and even in Italy, at the present day, the palaces have
remarkably low-pitched roofs!" Rome and Italy go to the ---- Antipodes!
Did you not stipulate that the house should be dry? do you think that
the old Italians ever saw a good shower of rain in all their lives? did
they? "_Nocte pluit tota_," is all very well in the poet's fugitive
inscription; but did they ever see a six-weeks' rain, such as we have
every autumn and spring, and generally in June and July, to say nothing
of January and February, in Devonshire? My dear sir, if you wish to lie
dry in your bed, and all your family, too, to the seventh generation,
downwards, make your roof suited to the quantity of rain that falls;
pitch up its sides not less steeply than forty-five degrees, and do not
be afraid if it rises to sixty, and so gives you the true mediaeval
proportion of the equilateral triangle. Do you consider it ugly? Then we
will ornament it; and we will make the chimney-stalks rise with some
degree of majesty, into an important feature of the architectural
physiognomy of the building. Are you grumbling at the expense, as you
did just now about that of the walls? What then! are you a Manchester
manufacturer, some dirty cotton-spinner? have you no faith in the
future? have you no regard for the dignity and comfort of your family?
are you, too, bitten with the demoralising commercial spirit of the age?
are you all for self and the present? have you no obligations towards
your ancestors? and are you unwilling to leave a name to be talked of by
your posterity? Why, to be sure it may tighten you up for five or six
years; but then do not stop quite so long in London: make your season
there rather shorter, and do not go so often to Newmarket, and keep away
from White's or Boodle's, and do not be so mad as to throw away any
more of those paltry thousands in contesting the county. Let the
Parliament and the country take care of themselves; they can very well
spare an occasional debater like yourself; the "glorious constitution"
of old England will take no harm even if _you_ do not assist in
concocting the hum-bug that is every year added to its het