in the matter of design, yet I do so with diffidence, and would not be understood to wish to insist upon my own views any further than others. may find that they are able to accept them as being true; and I hope that this will be remembered throughout the following remarks, by those who may read them.

In cottages more than in most buildings, it ought to be remembered that beauty depends above all things upon just proportion, and the fitness of parts to one another, and also on their apparent fitness to the purpose which each part is meant to serve, because fanciful ornament is quite out of place in ordinary cottage building. I do not, therefore, purpose to discuss anything of this kind, beyond the simplest kinds of ornament, and I shall be quite satisfied if any one should find herein any hints which may help him to make a plain common cottage less ugly than it is apt to be. That it need not be so, all will, I think, allow. It is only necessary for any one to look at the next three or four dozen cottages

that he may happen to see, to be convinced that some are very much uglier than others, although they be all equally plain and without ornament. This depends chiefly on proportion: on the proportion between the height of the walls and of the roof, between the windows and the rest of the walls; on the proportion, size, and position of the chimney-stacks; on the form of the roof, on the pitch of the roof, and the extent to which it overhangs, and on other particulars of a like kind—all of which particulars require observation and study, to learn how different varieties of them suit different forms of building. Moreover, it must be remembered, in making a design for a cottage, that there are some conditions which are now rightly considered imperative, but which are not found carried out in many old cottages-such, for instance, as that the rooms should be 7 ft. 6 in. or 8 ft. high; that in the bedrooms the roof should not come down within 5ft, or at the least within 4 ft. 6 in. of the floor; and also that at least four of the rooms in the cottage should have fireplaces

F

in them, and that each fireplace should have a separate flue.

Some old cottages are picturesque enough, from having a high-pitched roof and very low walls, the ground-floor rooms in fact being perhaps scarcely 6 ft. high, and the bedrooms entirely in the roof. It is easy to build a picturesque cottage thus, but it is not reasonable to expect human beings to live in them when built, and I hope to be able to show that a cottage may be built both good and handsome.

There are a few points with respect to the proportion and design of cottages, which I will notice here, and which will, I believe, be found to hold good very generally.

In the first place, I think that the less the roof is in proportion to the walls, in the elevation of any building, the shorter and lower the stacks of chimneys should be. This is certainly the case with cottages. Tall chimneys are frequently very handsome; few features in a building more so: but in cottages they are rarely employed without

producing the effect of the cottage being too small for the chimneys. They always produce this effect where the pitch of the roof is low. With very low walls and a very high-pitched thatched roof, they are in good keeping, and often very handsome; but it may be safely laid down that where the pitch of the roof is low, the chimneys must be low and as small as possible also.

Then, wide and low windows generally look better in a cottage than sash-windows, or windows of the usual proportions of sash-windows. These latter may do occasionally with designs in which the pitch of the roof is low, but they certainly are out of keeping with anything like a high-pitched roof.

If, in consequence of the height necessarily required for the rooms, the walls should appear awkwardly high in proportion to the roof, something may be done to lessen this effect by introducing one or two horizontal bands in the walls, either of a differently-coloured material, or, what generally produces a better effect, a string course

or two projecting two or three inches from the rest of the work.

The introduction of different colours in the walls at random, and without the definite object of altering the effect of the proportions of the buildings, has in general a tawdry and disagreeable effect, as may be observed in many buildings of the present day.

Considerable variety may be given to a design by merely placing the chimney-stack at one side of the ridge of the roof, instead of directly over the middle of it. This will very often give the building a much more picturesque outline than it would have in the ordinary way. But it is much more necessary, in this case, that the stack of chimneys should be light in appearance, as compared with the building it stands on, than when the stack is astride of the ridge; and when the chimney-stack is necessarily large, placing it at one side of the ridge only increases the appearance of top-heaviness, which is one of the worst faults that a design can have.