Page:The venture; an annual of art and literature.djvu/43

 TO ANY HOUSEHOLDER.

Some general instinct has remained with men, so that the consensus of nations has been in favour of light colours—light tones, rather, of whatever colours—for the outward colouring of towns; with some lamentable exceptions. As a rule it has been accident, and not design, that has darkened the exterior of modern houses; we have in London the darkest walls that ever rebuffed the sun. It is the water-colour of the rain, with soot in her colour-box, and no fresco of man's preparation, that has arrayed them so. The washing of the exterior of St. Paul's would have been better enterprise than the applications we know of within. But, short of this supreme degree of darkness, London had some time ago the unlucky inspiration to paint its houses, all about the West, in oil-colour of dark red. It was the complaint of the silk-stockinged century that the pedestrian must needs fare ill in town, for the same mud made black splashes on the white stockings, and white splashes on the black. In like manner the London climate that painted the light stone black, made the dark red (a most intolerable colour) a shade or two lighter with dust in time; after which some of the painted houses were reloaded with the red, and the owners of others had misgivings, and went back to the sticky white of custom.