The latest product of Art-Protestantism in the way of street ornament is the coloured house. A few years ago, apart from a shop, such a thing was unknown in London. When it came in, landlords wept for it, newspapers railed at it, and the public sniffed and jeered. But the painted house has gone through the usual course of all reforms - abuse, pity, ridicule, imitation.

We have all suffered from the difficulty of finding our way about such long, black, featureless ravines as Harley, Wimpole, Welbeck Streets, St. George's and Belgrave Roads, in Pimlico, or such dismal quadrangles as Manchester, Portman, and Berkeley Squares - all the houses looking alike, all painted a delicate creamy white, and all equally black. Mayfair and Marylebone rivalled each other in uniformity; a new door-knob or a blue door represented, but a very few years ago, the utmost stretch of metropolitan imagination. To trifle with the surface of a wall seemed not only a dangerous solecism, but something like a defiance of the vestry, or even the Board of Works. We are the slaves of uniformity! It is endeared to us even by soot For generations we have repressed most individual attempts to be better than the rest, and particularly in dress and decoration inside and outside the house.

Well, human faces all look alike if they are sufficiently grimy. Were such griminess the rule, we should hardly notice the features, but should have to devise some system of numbering, like houses, in order to know people apart. But we drew the line at faces, though outside slovenliness and filth were the rule till recently in the older neighbourhoods, whether patrician or plebeian. How long the inhabitants of Manchester, Berkeley, and Portman Squares tolerated dead cats on the unkempt flower beds! but they revolted at last, and called for the dustman and the gardener. How long have people bemoaned the want of mural architecture in England, unconscious that what they really wanted was colour, whereby to see what architecture they had got! Gazing up at the black faces of the clubhouses, no bas-relief, no stucco pattern, or stone frieze caught the eye - why? because the projections, which ought to tell light against the shadows of depressions, grew blacker than the depressions just in proportion to their projection into the sooty air.

The result was that appearance of flatness and a level tint, for only occasionally have we sunshine enough to light up dark edges.

But indeed there is a good deal worth lighting up - a good deal worth making visible - in our London facades and porticos. At the beginning of the Greek revival a century since, a large number of buildings of considerable merit sprang up, designed by wellinstructed architects, such as Inigo Jones, Chambers, the Adamses - that is, the merit was that of a good copy, the original being out of reach; but with all their research for Attic precedent, the Greco-maniacs overlooked one thing which was unquestionably Greek - colour in the streets. Excavation, and study, and the laborious suture of fragments had taught them much - given us many beautiful things; but these were, after all, the bones without the flesh, the form without the life; they did not know then, as we know now, that the frieze of the Parthenon was a blaze of colour, that all the capitals and bases whose dead forms were lovely possessed an added grace which had long decayed in the earth.

Pall Mall is a street of palaces, but the greater part of us have only just begun to suspect it. The Regent's Park possesses whole terraces of admirable construction; Marylebone is full of finely modelled lintels and porticos, and even bas-reliefs inserted in the large blank spaces, which deserve more attention. But in London it is possible to live with a superb bas-relief under one's eyes for years and not know it, owing, as I have said, first to the absence of sunlight, and next to the fact that in our sooty air the projecting portions get blacker than their ground, and so a level tint is formed. But why the dirt should be an argument against the only remedy for dirt is inconceivable, and looks very much like a 'vicious circle.' In a bright atmosphere no doubt colours are more brilliant, perhaps more enjoyed, and last longer; but in a dull one it seems but common sense to try and relieve monotony, even if it has to be done very often.

Often, indeed. And here another question obtrudes itself immediately. Why we should endure the nuisance of dirt, costly as it is, British conservatism alone knows. There have been many suggestions for clearing the carbon-laden atmosphere of London and Manchester, but they do not seem to be taken up by builders. The system advocated by Mr. Spence in 1871, of each house consuming its own smoke or utilising it by carrying it through the drains, is one which ought to have received more attention both from the philanthropic and aesthetic, since the deodorising of the sewage by the ammonia produced by burning coal might save many a precious life per annum, and the purifying of the air by diverting the smoke away from it would preserve, if not life, at least paint! Our darkest and most mischievous fogs are largely composed of the smoke driven westward from the east end of London. Our statistics show a grave proportion of deaths by fog-poisoning as well as drain-poisoning. Mr. Spence would persuade us that this fog is really the right thing in the wrong place; and it is possible that some day new attention to sanitary measures will render our dirty city not only more healthy and more happy, but more beautiful, by admitting here the sunlight that really often exists outside London in winter as well as in summer, but cannot get through our choking atmosphere.

Mais revenons a nos moutons - our coloured houses. Welbeck Street (Rev. H. R. Haweis) took the initiative in 1873 fa a house painted moss-green, relieved by red and black in the reveals of the windows and the balcony - an effort almost simultaneously supported by Townshend House (Mr. Alma Tadema) in the Regent's Park. The shock was at first so great to the popular mind, that little groups would collect and stare opposite, as if expecting a raree-show to emerge. But in the year following one or two neighbouring houses began to lay a little green and chocolate on their window sills in timid recognition of the improvement in the aspect. A second house in Welbeck Street turned red, with a sage-green door. Sir Charles Lyell, in Harley Street, had ventured on a bright blue door; but this vivid colour, being unsupported by colour elsewhere on the facade, was not successful as a contribution to the world of art Year by year the parents of the movement were amused to see how abuse was melting into that sincerest form of flattery - imitation.

As street after street began to furbish itself up, and don rainbow hues, the obtusest people suddenly awoke to perceive that they possessed a pretty cornice, and they picked it out with two drabs in lieu of one; then they thought that pseudo-Greek forms might venture upon the hues of Greek pottery - black, red, and pale yellow. This having happily a kind of precedent in the reviving admiration of classicism, caught the awakened fancy, and it is now curious to see how in Mayfair and Belgravia numerous houses have thus been copying each other in every shade of black, red, and yellow - some exceedingly well done, others unintelligently. Still the worst of them is an improvement on dirty white, for nothing in our climate wears worse than that.

Cavendish Square boasts several coloured houses, Gloucester Place many. Lady Combermere's house in Belgrave Square, and that of Lady Herbert of Lea, denote the conversion of the aristocracy. Wimpole and Harley Streets show some pretty combinations of colour - one lately painted with a capital mixture of dull-red relieved by yellow (not Etruscan), another in lavender with crimson lines, are real additions to the movement, and form good and harmonious features. The new hotel in Waterloo Place has thus made itself an ornament to the street. The Athenaeum Club has brought into view its fine frieze by colouring it in two tints, throwing up the figures, pale yellow on a red ground, an enormous improvement. My own house proves how a skilful use of colour enlarges the apparent size of the windows. Indeed, every little scrap of good architectural work can be enunciated by a little colour, much to the relief of the maligned race of architects, and to that of shortsighted pedestrians, who look for the bright space of colour with far greater ease than the half-obliterated lettering which may or may not occur at the corner of the street.

It is amusing, too, how often people who have been bitterest on these coloured houses when first painted are heard to say that ' now that the colour has toned down ' (in about six weeks) 'they really like it extremely.' The fact is, the paint has not 'toned down,' there has not been time; but their eye has got 'toned up' - and so the circle widens. And who, looking at the sour, viridescent spasms which attack stucco in wet weather, can honestly think that definite colours well combined are not an improvement? Colours last clean rather better than white; they need cost no more, or very little; they are less trouble than 'pointing' brick, and a good advertisement for the house painter.

It will no doubt be necessary before long to legislate for this almost intemperate fit of reform; for such terraces as Hanover and Sussex, etc, Regent's Park, ought unquestionably to be coloured all at once, all alike, and if possible by the same hand, and the concurrent taste of the inmates ought to be consulted by the landlords. But in streets or squares where the most heterogeneous architecture exists, heterogeneous colour (with proper regard to laws of art) can fairly be allowed; and the selfishness which would relegate all brightness and decoration to interiors ought to give way to the kinder impulse to put a little of what pleases us in our homes, where the people can enjoy it - outside our houses.