I liked the English habit of naming their houses; it shows the importance they attach to their homes.  All about the suburbs of London and in the outlying villages I noticed nearly every house and cottage had some appropriate designation, as Terrace House, Oaktree House, Ivy Cottage, or some Villa, usually cut into the stone gate-post, and this name is put on the address of the letters.  How much better to be known by your name than by your number!  I believe the same custom prevails in the country, and is common to the middle classes as well as to the aristocracy.  It is a good feature.  A house or a farm with an appropriate name, which everybody recognizes, must have an added value and importance.

Modern English houses are less showy than ours, and have more weight and permanence,—­no flat roofs and no painted outside shutters.  Indeed, that pride of American country people, and that abomination in the landscape, a white house with green blinds, I did not see a specimen of in England.  They do not aim to make their houses conspicuous, but the contrary.  They make a large, yellowish brick that has a pleasing effect in the wall.  Then a very short space of time in that climate suffices to take off the effect of newness, and give a mellow, sober hue to the building.  Another advantage of the climate is that it permits outside plastering.  Thus almost any stone may be imitated, and the work endure for ages; while our sudden changes, and extremes of heat and cold, of dampness and dryness, will cause the best work of this kind to peel off in a few years.

Then this people have better taste in building than we have, perhaps because they have the noblest samples and specimens of architecture constantly before them,—­those old feudal castles and royal residences, for instance.  I was astonished to see how homely and good they looked, how little they challenged admiration, and how much they emulated rocks and trees.  They were surely built in a simpler and more poetic age than this.  It was like meeting some plain, natural nobleman after contact with one of the bedizened, artificial sort.  The Tower of London, for instance, is as pleasing to the eye, has the same fitness and harmony, as a hut in the woods; and I should think an artist might have the same pleasure in copying it into his picture as he would in copying a pioneer’s log cabin.  So with Windsor Castle, which has the beauty of a ledge of rocks, and crowns the hill like a vast natural formation.  The warm, simple interior, too, of these castles and palaces, the honest oak without paint or varnish, the rich wood carvings, the ripe human tone and atmosphere,—­how it all contrasts, for instance, with the showy, gilded, cast-iron interior of our commercial or political palaces, where everything that smacks of life or nature is studiously excluded under the necessity of making the building fire-proof.