=_Donald G. Mitchell, 1822-._= (Manual, pp. 504, 531.)

From “Wayside Hints.”

=_239._= A TALK ABOUT PORCHES.

A country house without a porch is like a man without an eyebrow; it gives expression, and gives expression where you most want it.  The least office of a porch is that of affording protection against the rain-beat and the sun-beat.  It is an interpreter of character; it humanizes bald walls and windows; it emphasizes architectural tone; it gives hint of hospitality; it is a hand stretched out (figuratively and lumberingly, often) from the world within to the world without.

At a church door even, a porch seems to me to be a blessed thing, and a most worthy and patent demonstration of the overflowing Christian charity, and of the wish to give shelter.  Of all the images of wayside country churches which keep in my mind, those hang most persistently and agreeably, which show their jutting, defensive rooflets to keep the brunt of the storm from the church-goer while he yet fingers at the latch of entrance.

I doubt if there be not something beguiling in a porch over the door of a country shop—­something that relieves the odium of bargaining, and imbues even the small grocer with a flavor of cheap hospitalities.  The verandas (which is but a long translation of porch) that stretch along the great river front of the Bellevue Hospital diffuse somehow a gladsome cheer over that prodigious caravansery of the sick; and I never see the poor creatures in their bandaged heads and their flannel gowns, enjoying their convalescence in the sunshine of those exterior corridors, but I reckon the old corridors for as much as the young doctors, in bringing them from convalescence into strength, and a new fight with the bedevilments of the world.

What shall we say, too, of inn porches?  Does anybody doubt their fitness?  Is there any question of the fact—­with any person of reasonably imaginative mood—­that Falstaff and Nym and Bardolph, and the rest, once lolled upon the benches of the porch that overhung the door of the Boar’s Head Tavern, Eastcheap?  Any question about a porch, and a generous one, at the Tabard, Southwark—­presided over by that wonderful host who so quickened the story-telling humors of the Canterbury pilgrims of Master Chaucer?

Then again, in our time, if one were to peel away the verandas and the exterior corridors from our vast watering-place hostelries, what an arid baldness of wall and of character would be left!  All sentiment, all glowing memories, all the music of girlish footfalls, all echoes of laughter and banter and rollicking mirth, and tenderly uttered vows would be gone.

King David when he gave out to his son Solomon the designs for the building of the Temple, included among the very first of them, (1 Chron.  XXVIII. 11) the “pattern of a porch.”  It is not, however, of porches of shittim-wood and of gold, that I mean to talk just now—­nor even of those elaborate architectural features which will belong of necessity to the entrance-way of every complete study of a country house.  I plead only for some little mantling hood about every exterior door-way, however humble.