Spirit of Chambers's journal Author:William Chambers Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ENGLISH AND SCOTCH HOUSE-BUILDING. The English build their houses of brick, and the Scotch of stone. These peculiarities of taste and habit are so strongly as... more »sociated with the character of the two nations, that they may be frequently observed wherever the English and Scotch are planted, especially in foreign countries. When a Scotsman crosses the Border, at almost any point, he wonders how the people come to have such a predominating taste for brick. Every house he sees seems to be built with no other material, and all the towns and villages he travels through seem but piles of so many brickkilns set in rows. As he proceeds, he gets accustomed to this, as it appears to him, very strange fancy ; but he always feels a certain degree of pity for those who are doomed to inhabit houses with walls so very thin, and so little able to keep out the cold. When an Englishman, in the same manner, enters Scotland, he is apt to be as much surprised at finding that the houses are all reared of solid stone, like so many castles or public edifices ; and he is led to imagine that the Scotch are really an extravagant people in building their dwellings with a material so dear and difficult to be wrought. When the Scotch settle in England, they generally conform to the fashion of brick houses; but an Englishman, on emigrating northward, will try, if possible, to resist the national custom, and erect his cottage with his dearly beloved brick. These contrary tastes are very observable in Ireland : the English in the south—in Dublin for instance—adhering staunchly to brick, and the Scotch in the north sticking to the stone, which is so characteristic of their country. Some persons might be led to suppose that these diversities of taste in the architecture of dwelling-houses are the result of necess...« less