,
then keep to your two stories and to the old English method of building
your house round one or more courts. Go upon the old palatial, baronial,
or collegiate plan; no matter what may be the style of architecture you
adopt, this plan will be found suitable to any. The advantages of it are
as follows: first of all, it gives you the opportunity of having your
rooms all _en suite_, and yet not crowded together; next, it is more
sociable for the inmates of a large country mansion to have the windows
of their apartments looking partly inwards, as it were to the centre of
the house, and partly outwards to the surrounding scenery: and thirdly,
it requires and it gives the opportunity of having that most admirable
and most useful appendage of any large mansion,--a cloister, or covered
gallery, running round the whole interior of the court, either
projecting from the plane of the walls--and, if so, becoming highly
ornamental; or else formed within the walls, and, if so, giving an
unusual degree of warmth and ventilation. In this damp and uncertain
climate of ours, just consider how many days there are in the course of
the year, when the ladies and the children of a family cannot stir out
of doors, not even into the gardens; and then think of what a comfort it
would be to have a dry and airy and elegant promenade and place of
exercise within their own walls. Then the children may scamper about, if
it be, a proper cloister external to the house, and make that joyous
noise which is so essential to their health, without any fear of
annoying even the most nervous of mammas. Within an instant they may all
be under her own personal inspection, and yet they may have their
perfect freedom. Here may the ladies of the family walk for hours on a
wet day, and enjoy themselves without trouble, and with the facility of
being at home again in a minute. If the court is well laid out as a
flowery parterre, and the green-house is made to contribute its proper
supply of plants to the cloister, it becomes converted into a kind of
conservatory, and forms of itself an artificial or winter garden. Both a
cloister, and an internal corridor with windows opening into the former,
may very appropriately be constructed together, and then the
accommodation of this plan is complete.

Whoever has lived in a cloistered and court-built house will know the
convenient and comfortable feature we would here point out:--it is
especially suited to the climate of Engl