Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878., page 1 by Various Authors
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irls' school, a lawyer's office or a workingmen's club, and there are places where almost every cottage, every wooden balcony or overhanging oriel, suggests something romantic and antique. Even if no positive association is connected with one of these humbler specimens of English domestic architecture, you can fall back on the traditional home of love and poetry, the recollections of idyls and pastorals daily acted out by unconscious illustrators of the poets from one generation to another. Modern life engrafted on these old towns and villages seems prosaic and unattractive, though practically it is that which first strikes the eye. New fronts mask old buildings, as new manners do old virtues; and if we come to the frame and adjuncts of daily life, we must confess that nineteenth-century trivialities are intrinsically no worse than mediæval trivialities.
There are in Warwick more modern houses and smart shops than ancient gabled and half-timbered houses, but the relics of the past are still striking: witness the ancient porch of the good old "Malt-Shovel," with its bow-window, in which the Dudley retainers often caroused, and the oblique gables in one of the side streets, which Rimmer, a minute observer of English domestic architecture, thus describes: "An acute-angled street may be made to contain rectangular rooms on an upper story.... Draw an acute angle--say something a little less than a right angle--and cut it into compartments; or, if preferred, an obtuse angle, and cut this into compartments also. Now, the roadway may be so prescribed as to prevent right angles from being made on the basement, but the complementary angles are ingeniously made out by allowing the joists to be of extra length, and cutting the ends off when they come to the square. The effect is extremely picturesque, and I cannot remember seeing this peculiar piece of construction elsewhere."
At the western end of High street stands Leicester's Hospital, which was originally a hall belonging to two guilds, but, coming in