but whatever is identified with the daily life
and passions of our dead forefathers, now
gone as utterly as if they had never been, is
touched with somewhat of the mystery of
our human nature. The abiding brick and
stone become strange comments upon the
evanescent beings that reared them. In the
same way that we prize the flushing lights and
tender fire-paintings of an evening cloud, the
more because we know that they will soon
lapse into the broad and colourless air; and
for the same reason that we love the flowers
in a greater degree because there is in them
such a celestial hurry to be gone; so our
own life acquires a subtle grandeur from
its exceeding briefness compared with the
duration which it can confer. Any old
house is associated with the domesticities
of the dead; with their fireside joys and
griefs; with all that web of sensation and
emotion which we are now experiencing
precisely as they did. They have passed through
the turmoil, and the stillness of their sleep
seems to have fallen upon their dwellings.
Is there not a certain look of repose
about an old house which a new one never
possesses? Years have passed since the
noise of the trowel and the hammer was
heard in it: the quiet dust has entered into
the crannies of the work; and the workmen
have gone home to bed. In an old street, the
living inhabitants are as naught; the dead
men are the real possessors. We walk on
under the eyes of a vanquished generation,
and see, in imagination, the peaked beards,
ruffs, hose, leather jerkins, slashed doublets,
and stiff farthingales of Elizabeth's reign, or
the periwigs, laced coats, deep waistcoats, and
spreading hoops of the times of Anne and
the first and second Georges. I suppose
it is this deep human interest—this connection
with the great epic of life—that has made
me dream dreams and plan poems in the
dingiest holes and corners.

I am also an observer (in an amateur way)
of the old domestic architecture which has
been left behind; and am fond of tracing
the different styles of building which have
prevailed in different eras—the successive
strata of metropolitan geology. If all people
were Ruskins, they might gather a great deal
of what may be called domestic history from
the forms of the houses in which they dwell,
and a great deal of psychology, too. Every
kind of architecture peculiar to a particular
age is an expression of the general character
of that age; and thus it may be almost
literally said that men hang their banners on
the outer walls. They leave memorandums
of themselves, in the stones they heap up, as
well as in the books they write. What, for
instance, can be more characteristic of the
Shaksperian age than the rich, various,
grotesque, fanciful, conceited, style of building
houses that then prevailed: a style full of
vitality and feature—full of light and shade—
full of substance and ornament? One can
understand that in such houses was written
the finest poetry that the language has yet
produced. The moonlight phantasies of the
Midsummer Night's Dream, and the
many-coloured visions and severe moralities of
Spenser's great poem, have in them something
analogous to the edifices in which they were
conceived. Of course, comparatively few of
these houses now remain; but, towards the
east of the city where the metropolis
began, and from whence, in succeeding ages,
it has spread out on all sides, like the rays of
some vast star, streets composed mainly of
houses of the Tudor style of domestic architecture
are to be found. In Holywell Street,
in Wych Street, in parts of Holborn (Middle
How, for instance), in the neigbourhoods of
Smithfield and of the Tower, in High Street,
Southwark, in Little nooks of Clerkenwell,
and in other places, these relics of
Shakesperian London still lark. The beetling
cavernous stories—the small, diamond-paned
windows—the grotesque faces leering like
jubilant goblins from timber brackets and
supports—the carved roses, fleur-de-lis, and
other heraldic devices of the nobles who
formerly occupied these now decaying
tenements—the projecting leaden spouts, and
slanting roofs—may be met with, occasionally,
if we look in the right direction. Out of such
houses issued the citizens aud their wives and
daughters, on fine summer evenings, to see
the archery in Finsbury fields; or, earlier in
the afternoon (unlike the nocturnal play-goers
of these days), sauntered forth to pass
over into Soulhwark, and, at the little Globe
Theatre, with no aid from scenery or decorations,
delightedly to behold a new play of
Master Shakespeare. A few of these houses
yet remain in the great thoroughfares of the
Strand and Fleet Street; but they are
decreasing year by year. One, with a projecting
bulkhead over a shop, close to the west
side of Temple Bar, was pulled down about
seven or eight years ago; and another in
Fleet Street is now in progress of demolition.
I believe it is Disraeli who says that the
Strand is the most picturesque street in
London, on account of its varied architecture;
and certainly the old Elizabethan
houses which it still retains contribute
largely to this result, by breaking the
outline into wavering projections and
recesses.

The Dutch style of house-building, which
came in about the time of William the Third,
answers, equally with the Elizabethan, to the
peculiar character of the time. It is solid,
substantial, sturdy and unimaginative; yet
not without a degree of picturesqueness, on
account of its vast tiled roofs, looking like a
red hill-side, its little dormer windows, and
its mixture of red and brown bricks. The
era of predominant common-sense, and of
mental short-sightedness—the era which
established our liberties and founded the
national debt, which, in literature, saw the