ect and design of the elevation will have an intimate relation to the
physical appearance of the region, to the ideas, the pursuits, and the
history of its people.

Thus it was with the ancient Greeks and Romans, as we find their
domestic life revealed to us at Pompeii. In that delicious climate of
Campania, where the sun shines with a whitening and ever unclouded
splendour, and where winter's frosts may be said to be unknown, the
great thing wanted was shady coolness, privacy, and the absence of all
that might fatigue. Hence, in the arrangement of the Pompeian villas,
windows were comparatively unknown: the rooms were lighted from above;
the aperture for the light was open to the sky; whatever air could be
procured was precious. Colonnades and dark passages were first-rate
appendages of a fashionable man's habitation. His sleeping apartment was
a dark recess impervious to the sun's rays, lighted only by the
artificial glare of lamps, placed on those elegant candelabra, which
must be admired as models of fitness and beauty as long as imitative art
shall exist. He had not a staircase in all his house, or he would not
have if he could help it. The fatigue of lifting the foot in that hot
climate was a point of importance, and he carefully avoided it. The
house was a regular _frigidarium_. It answered the end proposed. It was
commodious, it was elegant--and it was therefore highly suitable to the
people and the place. But it does not therefore follow that it ought to
be imitated in a northern clime, nor indeed in any latitude, we would
rather say in any country, except Italy itself. Few parts of France and
Germany would admit of such erections--some portions of Spain and Greece
might. In Greece, indeed, the houses are much after the same plan, but
in Spain only portions of the south-eastern coast would allow of such a
style of building being considered at all habitable.

Place, then, a Pompeian villa at Highgate or Hampstead--build up an
Atrium with an Impluvium, add to it a Caldarium if you please, and a
Viridarium, too,--and _omne quod exit in um_: but you will not thereby
produce a good dwelling-house; far from it, you will have a show-box fit
for Cockneys to come and gape at: but nothing else.

Now, if we would only follow the same rule of common sense that the
Greek or Roman architect did on the shores of the Parthenopoean Gulf,
we should arrive at results, different indeed, but equally congruous to
our wants, equall