on the proper proportioning and arranging of
which the success of your edificative experiment entirely depends. Here
take the old stale maxim into immediate and constant use, "Cut your coat
according to your cloth;" and, if you are a man of only L2000 a-year, do
not build a house on a plan that will require L10,000 at least of annual
income to keep the window-shutters open. Nor, seeing that you are living
in the country, attempt to cramp yourself for room, and build a great
tall staring house, such as would pass muster in a city, but is
exceedingly out of place in a park. As a matter of domestic aesthetics,
do not think of giving yourself, and still less any of your guests, the
trouble of mounting up more than one set of stairs to go to bed, but
keep your reception and principal rooms on the ground floor, and your
private rooms, with all the bed-chambers, on the floor above. Since,
however, you have determined on going to the expense of a proper roof,
do not suppose that we are such bad architectural advisers as to
recommend that the roof should be useless. No; here let the female
servants and the children of the family, perhaps, too, a stray bachelor
friend or two, find their lodging; and above all, if you are a family
man, if you have any of those tender yearnings after posterity, which we
hope you have, introduce into the roof a feature which we will remind
you of by and by, and for which, if we could only persuade people that
such a very old and useful idea were a new one, and our own, we would
certainly take out a patent.

There should, then, be only two stories in a gentleman's country
residence, and a dormer or mansard story if we may so term it, in the
roof;--we will not be so vulgar as to call it a garret,--nor yet so
classical as to resort to the appellation of an attic. If, therefore,
you require a large house, take plenty of ground, and lay out all your
rooms _en suite_. Let all the offices, whence any noise or smell can
arise, be perfectly detached from the dwelling part of the
mansion:--such as the kitchens, sculleries, laundries, &c. They should
all be collected into a court with the coach-houses and stables on the
outside, and the whole range of the domestic offices on the other. Never
allow a kitchen to be placed under the same roof as your dining-room or
drawing-room: cut it off completely from the _corps de logis_, and let
it only communicate by a passage;--so shall you avoid all chance of
those anti