And now for the plan of your mansion, for the Ground Plan—the main part of the business, that, 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 £2000 a-year, do not build a house on a plan that will require £10,000 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 æsthetics, 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 anticipatory smells, the odour of which is sufficient to spoil your appetite for the best dressed dinner in the world. If you would have any use for the vault under your house, keep all your cellar stores, and all your "dry goods" there;—it will be a test of your house being well-built if they do not show any effects of damp after a few months' stowage below the level of the soil, yet in aere pleno. We do not mean to say that we would put one of our best and newest saddles, nor our favourite set of harness, in one of the lower vaults, to judge of the dampness of the house; but depend upon it, a pair or two of old shoes form excellent hygrometers; and you may detect the "dew-point" upon them with wonderful accuracy.
"But only look at how you are increasing the cost of the house by thus stretching out the house, and really wasting the space and ground!"—What! still harping on the same string—that eternal purse-string!—still at the gold and the notes? If you go on at this rate, my good sir, you will never do any thing notable in the house-line. Take a lesson from Louis XIV. when he built Versailles;—that sovereign had at least this one good quality,—he had a supreme contempt for money;—it cost him a great deal no doubt, but it is "Versailles," nec pluribus impar;—why, it is a quarter of a mile long, and there is, or rather was, room in it to have lodged all the crowned heads of Europe, courts, ministers, guards, and all. Never stint yourself for space; the ground you build on is your own; it is only the extra brick and mortar;—the number of windows is not increased by stretching the plan out, the internal fittings are not an atom more expensive. Be at ease for once in your life, and cast about widely for room.
And now, dear sir, if you can but once remove this prejudice of cost from your mind, you may set at defiance all those twaddling architects who come to you with their theories of the "smallest spaces of support," and who would fain persuade you that, because it is scientific to build many rooms with few materials, therefore you ought to dwell in a house erected on such principles,—and that they ought to build it for you. You may send them all to the right-about with their one-sided contracted notions: is the house to be built for your sake or for theirs? who is going to inherit it—you or they? who is to find out all the comforts and discomforts of the mansion—the owner or the architect?—If you, 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 England, and to the domestic habits of English families; it is one of the most ornamental features a house can possess; it gives great facilities to the waiting of the servants; it makes the house warm rather than cold; and it adds greatly to the comfort of the whole. As for the additional cost—let the cost be——! have we not entered our caveat against all such shabby pleas? Take this along with you, good sir,—do the thing well, or don't do it at all.
A TURKISH WATERING-PLACE.
Ten days ago, when snowed up by winter, recurrent for the third time this season, I could not compel myself to the recollection of my Adalian experiences. Now that I am sitting with window thrown wide open, and with fire raked out, the spirit of the scene encourages memories of my visit to that very hot emporium of Caramania.
We had been kept on the Smyrna station till we pretty well knew it under every changing phase of season. Through the rigour of winter we had been brought now to the very flagrance of the dog-star, to the time when human nature can pretend no opposition to the mood of the lordly sun. Even late in the autumn, these clear skies afford so little interruption to the tide of sunbeams, that one is not quite exempt from risk of coup de soleil. Indeed this is perhaps the very time when the untutored stranger is particularly exposed to this danger. It is the only time of the year when travelling can be pursued as a serious occupation; or when one of the pale-faced Occidentals can venture forth sub dio at mid-day, without positive madness. During the months that, on the admission of the indigenous, do duty as summer, the state of things is so evidently beyond a joke, that no idea of trifling therewith enters into the most unsophisticated mind. Life is reduced to something very like a resignation of the sturdy substance of the day, and a diligent employment of the two fag-ends. The intervening hours must be slept away, or read away, or somehow employed without the requisition of corporeal activity. And, considering that these are the hours during which musquitoes vex not, and lesser tormentors of the rampant kind are inactive, it is no slight boon to have such an interval, during some part of which you may sleep in peace. As for the night, you may use it for eating ices, or strolling on the Marina, or pulling out on the phosphorescent waters of the bay; but unless you be very fresh, you will hardly think of using that as the time for turning in. And thus are rendered grateful those slumbers which are induced by the prevailing spirit of noon. Of course, under such conditions of existence, there is no great probability that much risk will be encountered by any one gifted with the ordinary instinct of self-preservation. Should any one be foolhardy enough to dare for himself the experiment, he would scarcely find a surridgi to furnish animals, or a guide willing to pilot him. And should he even make a start of it, am I not the very man to know what a lesson he would get in the course of the first six hours of his march; and to predict that he would, should any brains be then remaining to him, turn back on the strength of that same sample? It is only a very young, and somewhat foolish person, who would be at all likely to be found in this predicament. The dissuasion of the indigenous is so earnest, and so without exception, that, considering their knowledge of the facts, a prudent stranger must perceive in them the substance of reason. The Asiatics, perhaps, carry a little too far the dread of exposure to the atmospheric influences of summer; for they are careful to shut out even the cool breezes of night, and dread the odour of freshness that a shower calls forth from the earth. This delightful exhalation they affirm to be the producer of fever. But indeed we may concede to them the entertaining of some whimsies on this subject, as being the necessary contingencies on their fatal experiences of marsh malaria.