ngs. If you have seen the best old brick
mansions of New England, and will imagine them more beautifully
proportioned, set off by balancing wings and having infinitely finer
details as to doorways, windows, porticos, and also as to wood carvings
and fixtures within--as, for instance, the beautiful silver latches and
hinges of the Chase house at Annapolis--you will gather something of the
flavor of these old Southern homes. For though such venerable mansions
as the Chase, Paca, Brice, Hammond, Ridout, and Bordley houses, in
Annapolis, are not without family resemblance to the best New England
colonial houses, the resemblance is of a kind to emphasize the
differences, not only between the mansions of the North and South, but
between the builders of them. The contrast is subtle, but marked.

Your New England house, beautiful as it is, is stamped with austere
simplicity. The man who built it was probably a scholar but he was
almost certainly a Calvinist. He habited himself in black and was served
by serving maids, instead of slaves in livery. If a woman was not
flat-chested and forlorn, he was prone to regard her as the devil
masquerading for the downfall of man--and no doubt with some justice,
too. Night and morning he presided at family prayers, the purpose of
which was to impress upon his family and servants that to have a good
time was wicked, and that to be gay in this life meant hell-fire and
damnation in the next.

Upon this pious person his cousin of Annapolis looked with something not
unlike contempt; for the latter, though he too was a scholar, possessed
the sort of scholarliness which takes into account beauty and the lore
of cosmopolitanism. He may have been religious or he may not have been,
but if religious he demanded something handsome, something stylish, in
his religion, as he did also in his residence, in his wife, his sons,
his daughters, his horses, coaches, dinners, wines, and slaves. He did
things with a flourish, and was not beset by a perpetual consciousness
and fear of hell. He approved of pretty women; he made love to them; he
married them; he was the father of them. His pretty daughters married
men who also admired pretty women, and became the mothers of other
pretty women, who became, in turn, the mothers and grandmothers of the
pretty women of the South to-day.

Your old-time Annapolis gentleman's ideas of a republic were far indeed
from those now current, for he understood perfectly the diffe