Chapter 7

PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ST. PAUL.Gilbert & Taylor, Architects.

PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ST. PAUL.

Gilbert & Taylor, Architects.

In the material and materializing development of the West, it is not surprising that the chief object of local pride should not be the local church, but the local hotel. “Of course a large hotel” is now, as in Trollope’s time,

WEST HOTEL, MINNEAPOLIS.L. S. Buffington, Architect.

WEST HOTEL, MINNEAPOLIS.

L. S. Buffington, Architect.

a necessary ingredient of a local “boom.” In respect of architecture the large hotel of Minneapolis has a decided advantage over the large hotel of St. Paul. For the caravansary of the older town is an example of the kind of secular Victorian Gothic that was stimulated by the erection of Sir Gilbert Scott’s Midland Hotel in London, than which a less eligible model could scarcely be put before an untrained designer, since there is little in it to redeem an uneasy and uninteresting design except carefully studied and carefully adjusted detail. This careful study and adjustment being omitted, as they are in the Hotel Ryan, and a multiplicity of features retained and still further confusedby a random introduction of color, the result is a bewildering and saltatory edifice which has nothing of interest except the banded piers of the basement. The West Hotel in Minneapolis is a much more considerable structure. It has a general composition, both vertically and laterally, consisting in the former case of three divisions, of which the central is rather the most important, and in the latter of an emphasis of the centre and the ends in each front and of a subordination of the intervening wall. Here, also, there is a multiplicity of features, but they are not so numerous or distributed so much at random as to prevent us from seeing the countenance, for undeniably the building has a physiognomy, and that is in itself an attainment. In artistic quality the features are very various, and the one trait they seem to have in common is a disregard for academic correctness or for purity of style. This is conspicuous in the main entrance, which is perhaps the most effective and successful of them, being a massive and powerful porte-cochère, in which, however, an unmistakably Gothic dwarf column adjoins a panelled pilaster, which as unmistakably owes its origin to the Renaissance, and a like freedom of eclecticism may be observed throughout the building. In its degree this freedom may be Western, though a European architect would be apt to dismiss it indiscriminately as American; whereas an American architect would be more apt to ask himself, with respect to any particular manifestation of it, whether it was really, and not only conventionally, a solecism. In this place the conjunction does not strike one as incongruous, but there are other features in which the incongruity is real, such as the repeated projections of long and ugly corbels to support things that are pretty evidently there mainly for the purpose of being supported. The impregnablecriticism of the Vicar of Wakefield, that the picture would have been better if the artist had taken more pains, is especially applicable to this edifice. It might have been both chastened and clarified by severer study; but it is a compliment to it, as American hotel architecture goes, to wish that it had been more carefully matured by its designer before being irretrievably executed. The interior presents several interesting points of design as well as of arrangement, but perhaps it owes its chief attractiveness to the rich and quiet decoration of those of its rooms that have been intrusted to Mr. Bradstreet, who for many years has been acting as an evangelist of good taste to the two cities, and who for at least the earlier of those years must have felt that he was an evangelistin partibus. The interior design and decoration of the opera-house at Minneapolis is a yet more important illustration of his skill; but interiors are beyond our present scope.

For public works other than public buildings, the two cities are not as yet very notable. The site of St. Paul makes a bridge across the river at this point a very conspicuous object, and perhaps nowhere in the world would a noble and monumental bridge be more effective. The existing bridges, however, are works of the barest utility, apparently designed by railroad engineers with no thought of anything beyond efficiency and economy, and they are annoying interruptions to the panorama unrolled to the spectator from the hill-side in the shining reach of the great river. Minneapolis has been more fortunate in this respect, although the river by no means plays so important a part in its landscape. The suspension-bridge of Trollope’s time has, of course, long since disappeared, having been replaced by another, built in 1876 from the designs of Mr. Griffith, which was a highly picturesque object,and was perhaps the most satisfactory solution yet attained, though by no means a completely satisfactory solution, of the artistic problem involved in the design of a suspension-bridge; a problem which to most designers of such bridges does not appear to be involved in it at all.[G]It is very unfortunate that although the Minneapolitans appreciated this structure as one of their chief municipal ornaments, they should, nevertheless, have sacrificed it quite ruthlessly to the need of greater accommodation; whereas there could scarcely have been any insuperable difficulty in moving the site of the new bridge that the new exigencies demanded so that the old might be preserved. In another respect, Minneapolis has derived a great advantage from the capacity and the necessity of taking long views that are imposed upon her people by the conditions of their lives. This is the reservation, at the instigation of a few provident and public-spirited citizens, of the three lakes that lie in the segment of a circle a few miles inland from the existing city, and of the strip of land connecting them. Even now, with little improvement beyond road-making, the circuit of the future parks is a delightful drive; and when Minneapolis shall have expanded until they constitute a bounding boulevard, the value of them as a municipal possession will be quite incalculable.

The aspect of the commercial quarters of the two cities has more points of difference than of resemblance. The differences proceed mainly from the fact already noted, that the commercial quarter of St. Paul is cramped as well as limited by the topography, and that it is all coming to be occupied by a serried mass of lofty buildings, whereas the lofty buildings of Minneapolis are still detached objects erected in anticipation

LUMBER EXCHANGE, MINNEAPOLIS.Long & Kees, Architects.

LUMBER EXCHANGE, MINNEAPOLIS.

Long & Kees, Architects.

of the pressure for room that has not yet begun to be felt. It is an odd illustration of the local rivalry that although the cities are so near together, the architects are confined to their respective fields, and it is very unusual, if not unexampled, that an architect of either is employed in the other. Such an employment would very likely be resented as incivism. Eastern architects are admitted on occasion as out of the competition, but in the main each city is built according to the plans of the local designers. The individual characteristics of the busiest and most successful architects are thus impressed upon the general appearance of the town, and go to widen the difference due to

ENTRANCE TO BANK OF COMMERCE, MINNEAPOLIS.Harry W. Jones, Architect.

ENTRANCE TO BANK OF COMMERCE, MINNEAPOLIS.

Harry W. Jones, Architect.

natural causes. The best examples of commercial architecture in Minneapolis, such as the Bank of Commerce and the Lumber Exchange, before its partial destruction by fire, have the same straightforward and severely business-like character as the buildings designed by Mr. Root in Chicago, and, indeed, they seem to owe not a little to suggestions derived from him. The treatment of the Lumber Exchange, in particular, indicates an admiring study of his work. Here the centre of the front is signalized by projecting shallow oriels carried through the five central stories of the buildingon each side of the ample opening in each story directly over the entrance, and by flanking this central bay in the upper division with narrow and solid turrets, corbelled and pinnacled. The scheme is not so effectively wrought out as it deserves to be, and as it might be. The central feature is not developed into predominance, and the main divisions of the building are no more emphasized in treatment than the divisions between the intermediate stories. The observer may recur to the Vicar of Wakefield to express his regret that the promise of so promising a scheme should not have been fulfilled, although, in spite of its shortcomings, the result is a respectable “business block.” These remarks apply to the original building, and not to the building as it has since been reconstructed by the addition of two stories which throw out the relations of its parts, and make it difficult to decipher the original scheme. The Bank of Commerce is as frankly utilitarian as the Lumber Exchange, the designer having relaxed the restraint imposed upon him by the prosaic and pedestrian character of his problem only in the design of the scholarly and rather ornate entrances. For the rest, the architecture is but the expression of the structure, which is expressed clearly and with vigor. The longer front shows the odd notion of emphasizing the centre by withdrawing it, a procedure apparently irrational, which has, however, the compensation of giving value and detachment to the entrance at its base. The problem was much more promising than that of the Lumber Exchange, seeing that here, with an ample area, there are but six stories against ten, and it is out of all comparison better solved. The four central stories are grouped by piers continued through them and connected by round arches above the fifth, while the first and sixth are sharply separated

CORNER OF BANK OF COMMERCE, MINNEAPOLIS.

in treatment, the former as an unmistakable basement, with a plain segment-headed opening in each bay, and the latter as an unmistakable attic, with a triplet of lintelled and shafted openings aligned over each of the round arches. The fronts are, moreover, distinguished, without in the least compromising the utilitarian purpose of the structure, by the use of the architectural devices the lack of which one deplores in the other building, insomuch that the difference between the two is the difference between a building merely

THE “GLOBE” BUILDING, MINNEAPOLIS.E. Townsend Mix, Architect.

THE “GLOBE” BUILDING, MINNEAPOLIS.

E. Townsend Mix, Architect.

blocked out and a finished building, and suggests again that the Lumber Exchange must have been designed under pressure. The building of the “Globe” newspaper, in Minneapolis, is a vigorous composition in Richardsonian Romanesque, excessively broken and diversified, doubtless, for its extent, but with interesting pieces of detail, and with a picturesque angle tower that comes in very happily from several points of view of the business quarter. The emphatic framing of this tower between two plain piers is a noteworthy point of design, and so is the use of the device that emphasizes the angles throughout their whole extent, while still keeping the vertical lines in subordination to the horizontal.

ENTRANCE TO “PIONEER PRESS” BUILDING, ST. PAUL.S. S. Beman, Architect.

ENTRANCE TO “PIONEER PRESS” BUILDING, ST. PAUL.

S. S. Beman, Architect.

Among the business blocks of St. Paul, the building of the “Pioneer Press” newspaper is eminent for the strictness with which the design conforms itself to the utilitarian conditions of the structure, and the impressiveness of the result attained, not in spite of those apparently forbidding conditions, but by means of them. Here also Mr. Root’s buildings, to which this praise belongs in so high a degree, have evidently enough inculcated their lesson upon the designer of the present structure. An uncompromising parallelopiped of brown brick rears itself to the height of twelve stories, with no break at all in its outline, and with no architecture that is not evolved directly from the requirements of the building. One does not seem to be praising a man very highly to praise him for talking prose when he has a prosaic subject. A mere incompetency to poetry would apparently suffice to earn this moderate eulogy. Yet, in fact, nothing is much rarer in our architecture than the power to deny one’s self irrelevant beauties. The “Pioneer Press” building is a basement of three stones, the first story of

CORNER OF “PIONEER PRESS” BUILDING.

the brick-work counting in with the two-story substructure of masonry, carrying a superstructure of seven, crowned with an attic of two. This latter feature proceeds, doubtless, from the special requirement of a newspaper office superposed upon a business block, and it may be inferred that to this requirement is due the greater enrichment of the lower of the two attic stories, contrary to the usual arrangement, and testifying the architect’s belief, mistaken or not, that the editorial function is of more dignity and worthier of celebration than the typographical. At any rate, the unusual disposition is architecturally fortunate, since it provides, in the absolutely plain openings of what is presumably the composing-room, a grateful interval between the comparative richness of the arcades beneath and of the cornice above. In the main front, the ample entrance at the centre supplies a visible motive for the vertical as well as for the subordinate lateral division. It is developed through the three stories of the basement, and it is recognised in a prolongation upward of its flanking piers through the central division—whichis completed by round arches, the spandrels of which are decorated—and through the attic, so as to effect a triple division for the front. The unostentatious devices are highly effective by which the monotony that would result from an identical treatment of the seven central stories is relieved, while the impression made by the magnitude of such a mass is retained. The terminal piers are left entirely unbroken throughout all their extent, except for a continuous string course above the eighth story, which might better have been omitted, since it cuts the intermediate piers very awkwardly, and detracts from the value of the heavier string course only one story higher that has an evident reason of being, as the springing course of the arcade; while the intermediate piers are crossed by string courses above the fifth and the ninth stories, so as to give to the central and dominant feature of the main composition a triple division of its own into a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The building is very successful, and the more successful because the designer has shirked nothing and blinked nothing, but out of this nettle, commercial demands, has plucked this flower, commercial architecture. The same praise of an entire relevancy to its purpose belongs to the Bank of Minnesota, a well-proportioned and well-divided piece of masonry, in spite of more effort at variety in outline, and of somewhat more of fantasy in detail. The former is manifested in the treatment of the roof, in which the gables of the upper story are relieved against a low mansard; and the latter in the design of these gables and of the rich and effective entrance. The problem, as one of composition, is very much simplified here, since the building is but of six stories, and the dilemma of monotony or miscellany, which so awfully confronts the designers of ten andtwelve story buildings, does not present itself. The two lower stories, though quite differently detailed, are here grouped into an architectural basement, the grouping being emphasized in the main front by the extension of the entrance through both. The superstructure is of three stories, quite identical and very plain in treatment, and above is the lighter and more open fenestration of the gabled attic.

BANK OF MINNESOTA, ST. PAUL.Wilcox & Johnson, Architects.

BANK OF MINNESOTA, ST. PAUL.

Wilcox & Johnson, Architects.

Of far more extent and pretension than this, being

TOP OF NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, ST. PAUL.Babb, Cook, & Willard, Architects.

TOP OF NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, ST. PAUL.

Babb, Cook, & Willard, Architects.

indeed perhaps the costliest and most “important” of all the business block of St. Paul, is the building of the New York Life Insurance Company. In saying that the total impression of this edifice is one of picturesque quaintness, one seems to deny its typicalness, if not its appropriateness, as a housing and an expression of the local genius, for assuredly there is nothing quaint about the Western business man or his procedures during business hours, however quaint and even picturesque one may find him when relaxing into anecdote in his hours of ease. The building owes its quaintness in great part to the division of its superstructure into two unequal masses flanking a narrow court, at the base of which is the main entrance. The general arrangement is not uncommon in the business blocks of New York. The unequal division into masses, of which one is just twice as wide as the other, looks capricious in the present detached condition of the building; though whenanother lofty building abuts upon it, the inequality will be seen to be a sensible precaution to secure the effective lighting of the narrower mass, the light for the wider being secured by a street upon one side as well as by the court upon the other. Even so, this will not be so intuitively beheld as the fact of the inequality itself, and as the differences of treatment to which it gives rise and by which it is emphasized; for the quaintness resulting from the asymmetry is so far from being ungrateful to the designer that he has seized upon it with avidity, and developed it by all the means in his power. Quaintness is the word that everybody uses spontaneously to express the character of the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance, and the treatment of these unequal gables is obviously derived from Flemish examples. The origin of their crow steps and ailerons is unmistakable, and the treatment of the grouped and somewhat huddled openings, and their wreathed pediments and bull’s-eyes, richly and heavily framed in terra-cotta, is equally characteristic, to the point of being baroque. This character is quite evidently meant, and the picturesqueness that results from it is undeniable, and gives the building its prevailing expression; howbeit it is confined to the gables, the treatment of the substructure being as “architecturesque” as that of the superstructure is picturesque. A simple and massive basement of two stories in masonry carries the five stones of brick-work heavily quoined in stone that constitute the body of the building, and this is itself subdivided by slight but sufficient differences, the lower story being altogether of masonry, and the upper arcaded. An intermediate story, emphatically marked off above and below, separates this body from the two-story roof, the gables of which we have been considering. The main entrance, which gives

ENTRANCE TO NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, ST. PAUL.

access to a stately and sumptuous corridor, seems itself extraneous to the building, having little congruity either with the straightforward and structural treatment of the main building, or with the bulbous picturesqueness of the gables. The care with which its detail is studied is evident, and also the elegance of the detail in its kind and in its place; but it does not seem to be in its place anywhere out-of-doors, and still less as applied to the entrance of a business block to which it is merely applied, and from which it is not developed. Its extreme delicacy, indeed, almost gives the impression that it ismeant to be a still small voice of scholarly protest on the part of an “Eastern” architect against a “boisterous and rough-hewn” Westernness. A still smaller voice of protest seems to be emitted by the design of the Endicott Arcade, the voice of one crying, very softly, in the wilderness. So ostentatiously discreet is the detail of this building, indeed, so minute the scale of it, and so studious the avoidance of anything like stress and the effort for understatement, that the very quietness of its remonstrance gives it the effect of vociferation.

“He who in quest of quiet ‘Silence’ hoots,Is apt to make the hubbub he imputes.”

It seems to be an explicit expostulation, for example, with the architect of the Guaranty Loan Building in Minneapolis, which has many striking details not without ingenuity, and certainly not without “enterprise,” but as certainly without the refinement that comes of a studied and affectionate elaboration, insomuch that this also may be admitted to be W——n, and to invite the full force of Dryden’s criticism. The building in the exterior of which this mild remonstrance is made has an interior feature that is noteworthy for other qualities than the avoidance of indiscretion and overstatement—the “arcade,” so called, from which it takes its name—a broad corridor, sumptuous in material and treatment to the “palatial” point, one’s admiration for which is not destroyed, though it is abated, by a consideration of its irrelevancy to a business block. The building of the New York Life in Minneapolis, by the same architects as the building of the same corporation in St. Paul, is more readily recognizable by a New-Yorker as their work. It is a much more commonplace and a much more utilitarian composition—a basement of four stories, of which two are in masonry, carrying a central division also of four and an attic of two, the superstructure

NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, MINNEAPOLIS.Babb, Cook, & Willard, Architects.

NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, MINNEAPOLIS.

Babb, Cook, & Willard, Architects.

being of brick-work. The two principal divisions are too nearly equal; nor does the change of material effected by building the two upper stories of the basement in brick-work achieve the rhythmic relation for the attainment of which it was doubtless introduced. But the structure is nevertheless a more satisfactory example of commercial architecture than the St. Paul building. Its entrance, of four fluted and banded columns of a very free Roman Doric, with the platform on consoles above, has strength and dignity, and is a feature that can evidently be freely exposed to the weather, and that is not incongruous as the portal of a great commercial building. A very noteworthy feature of the interior is the double spiral staircase inmetal that has apparently been inspired by the famous rood screen of St. Étienne du Mont in Paris, and that is a very taking and successful design, in which the treatment of the material is ingenious and characteristic.

VESTIBULE OF NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, MINNEAPOLIS.

We have seen that the huddled condition of the business quarter of St. Paul, practically a disadvantage in comparison with the spaciousness of Minneapolis, has become architecturally a positive advantage. The natural advantages with respect to the quarters of residence seem to be strongly on the side of St. Paul. The

DWELLING IN MINNEAPOLIS.Harry W. Jones, Architect.

DWELLING IN MINNEAPOLIS.

Harry W. Jones, Architect.

river-front at Minneapolis is not available for house-building, nor is there any other topographical indication of a fashionable quarter, except what is furnished by the slight undulations of the plateau. The more pretentious houses are for the most part scattered, and, of course, much more isolated than the towering commercial buildings. On the other hand, the fashionable quarter of St. Paul is distinctly marked out by nature. It could not have been established anywhere but at the edge of the bluff overhanging the town and commanding the Mississippi. Surely this height must have been one of those eminences that struck the imagination of Trollope when they were yet unoccupied. And now the “noble residences” have come to crown the hill-side, and really noble residences many of them are. There are perhaps as skilfully designed houses in the younger city, and certainly there are houses as costly; but there is nothing to be compared with the massing of the handsome houses of St. Paul upon the ridge

DWELLING IN ST. PAUL.Mould & McNichol, Architects.

DWELLING IN ST. PAUL.

Mould & McNichol, Architects.

above the river. Indeed, there are very few streets in the United States that give in as high a degree as Summit Avenue the sense of an expenditure liberal without ostentation, directed by skill, and restrained by taste. What mainly strikes a pilgrim from the East is not so much the merit of the best of these houses, as the fact that there are no bad ones; none, at least, so bad as to disturb the general impression of richness and refinement, and none that make the crude display of “new money” that is to be seen in the fashionable quarters of cities even richer and far older. The houses rise, to borrow one of Ruskin’s eloquent phrases, “in fair fulfilment of domestic service and modesty of home seclusion.” The air of completeness, of finish, of “keeping,” so rare in American towns, is here as marked as at Newport. In the architecture there is a wide variety, which does not, however, suffice to destroy the homogeneousness of the total effect. Suggestions from the Romanesque perhaps prevail, and testify anew to the

PORTE-COCHÈRE, ST. PAUL.Wilcox & Johnson, Architects.

PORTE-COCHÈRE, ST. PAUL.

Wilcox & Johnson, Architects.

influence of Richardson, though there are suggestions from the Renaissance and from pointed architecture that show scholarship as well as invention. The cleverness and ingenuity of a porte-cochère of two pointed arches are not diminished by the likelihood that it was suggested by a canopied tomb in a cathedral. But, indeed, from whatever source the inspiration of the architects may have come, it is everywhere plain that they have had no intention of presenting “examples” of historical architecture, and highly unlikely that they would be disturbed by the detection in their work of solecisms that were such merely from the academic point of view. It is scarcely worth while to go into specific criticism of their domestic work. To illustrate it is to show that the designers of the best of it are quite abreast of the architects of the older parts of the country, and that theyare able to command an equal skill of craftsmanship in the execution of their designs.

PORCH IN ST. PAUL.Mould & McNichol, Architects.

PORCH IN ST. PAUL.

Mould & McNichol, Architects.

This does not answer our question whether there is any such thing as Western architecture, or whether these papers should not rather have been entitled “Glimpses of Architecture in the West.” The interest in this art throughout the West is at least as general as the interest in it throughout the East, and it is attested in the twin cities by the existence of a flourishing and enterprising periodical, the “Northwestern Architect,” to which I am glad to confess my obligations. It is natural that this interest, when joined to an intense local patriotism, should lead to a magnifying of the Westernness of such structures as are the subjects of local pride. It is common enough to hear the same local patriot who declaims to you in praise of Western architecture explain also

FROM A DWELLING IN ST. PAUL.Gilbert & Taylor, Architects.

FROM A DWELLING IN ST. PAUL.

Gilbert & Taylor, Architects.

that the specimens of it which he commends to your admiration are the work of architects of “Eastern” birth or training. Now, if not in Dickens’s time, the “man of Boston raisin’”is recognized in the West to have his uses. The question whether there is any American architecture is not yet so triumphantly answered that it is other than provincial to lay much stress on local differences. The general impression that the Eastern observer derives from Western architecture is the same that American architecture in general makes upon the European observer; and that is, that it is a very much emancipated architecture. Our architects are assuredly less trammelled by tradition than those of any older countries, and the architects of the West are even less trammelled than those of the East. Their characteristic buildings show this characteristic equally, whether they be good or bad. The towering commercial structures that are forced upon them by new conditions and

DWELLINGS IN ST. PAUL.Wilcox & Johnson, Architects.

DWELLINGS IN ST. PAUL.

Wilcox & Johnson, Architects.

facilities are very seldom specimens of any historical style; and the best and the worst of these, the most and the least studied, are apt to be equally hard to classify. To be emancipated is not a merit; and to judge whether or not it is an advantage, one needs to examine the performances in which the emancipation is exhibited. “That a good man be ‘free,’ as we call it,” says Carlyle, in one of his most emphatic Jeremiads—“be permitted to unfold himself in works of goodness and nobleness—is surely a blessing to him, immense and indispensable;to him and to those about him. But that a bad man be ‘free’—permitted to unfold himself inhisparticular way—is, contrariwise, the fatallest curse you could inflict upon him; curse, and nothing else, to him and all his neighbors.”

There is here not a question of morals, but of knowledge and competency. The restraints in architecture of a recognized school, of a prevailing style, are useful and salutary in proportion to the absence of restraint that the architect is capable of imposing upon himself. The secular tradition of French architecture, imposed by public authority and inculcated by official academics, is felt as a trammel by many architects, who, nevertheless, have every reason to feel grateful for the power of design which this same official curriculum has trained and developed. In England the fear of the archæologists and of the ecclesiologists operated, during the period of modern Gothic at least, with equal force, though without any official sanction. To be “ungrammatical,” not to adopt a particular phase of historical architecture, and not to confine one’s self to it in a design, was there the unforgivable offence, even though the incongruities that resulted from transcending it were imperceptible to an artist and obvious only to an archæologist. A designer thoroughly trained under either of these systems, and then transferred to this country as a practitioner, must feel, as many such a practitioner has in fact felt, that he was suddenly unshackled, and that his emancipation was an unmixed advantage to him; but it is none the less true that his power to use his liberty wisely came from the discipline that was now relaxed. The academic prolusions of the Beaux Arts, or the exercises of a draughtsman, have served their purpose in qualifying him for independent design. The advocates of the curriculum of the English public schools maintain that,

PORCH IN ST. PAUL.A. H. Stem, Architect.

PORCH IN ST. PAUL.

A. H. Stem, Architect.

obsolete as it seems, even the practice of making Latin verses has its great benefits in imparting to the pupil the command of literary form and of beauty of diction. There are many examples to sustain this contention, as well as the analogous contention that a faithful study and reproduction of antique or of mediæval architecture are highly useful, if not altogether indispensable, to cultivate an architect’s power of design. Only it may bepointed out that the use of these studies is to enable the student to express himself with more power and grace in the vernacular, and that one no longer reverts to Latin verse when he has really something to say. The monuments that are accepted as models by the modern world are themselves the results of the labors of successive generations. It was by a secular process that the same structural elements employed at Thebes and Karnac were developed to the perfection of the Parthenon. In proportion to the newness of their problems it is to be expected that the efforts of our architects will be crude; but there is a vast difference between the crudity of a serious and matured attempt to do a new thing and the crudity of mere ignorance and self-sufficiency. Evidently the progress of American architecture will not be promoted by the labors of designers, whether they be “Western” or “Eastern,” who have merely “lived in the alms basket” of architectural forms, and whose notion of architecture consists in multiplying “features,” as who should think to enhance the expressiveness of the human countenance by adorning it with two noses.

One cannot neologize with any promise of success unless he knows what is already in the dictionary; and a professional equipment that puts its owner really in possession of the best that has been done in the world is indispensable to successful eclecticism in architecture. On the other hand, it is equally true that no progress can result from the labors of architects whose training has made them so fastidious that they are more revolted by the crudity of the forms that result from the attempt to express a new meaning than by the failure to make the attempt, and so conceal what they are really doing behind a mask of historical architecture, of which the elegance is quite irrelevant. This latter fault is that of modern architecture in general. The history of thatarchitecture indicates that it is a fault even more unpromising of progress than the crudities of an emancipated architecture, in which the discipline of the designer fails to supply the place of the artificial check of an historical style. It is more feasible to tame exuberances than to create a soul under the ribs of death. The emancipation of American architecture is thus ultimately more hopeful than if it were put under academic bonds to keep the peace. It may freely be admitted that many of its manifestations are not for the present joyous, but grievous, and that to throw upon the individual designer the responsibility withheld from a designer with whom fidelity to style is the first duty is a process that fails when his work, as has been wittily said, “shows no more self-restraint than a bunch of fire-crackers.” But these papers have also borne witness that there are among the emancipated practitioners of architecture in the West men who have shown that they can use their liberty wisely, and whose work can be hailed as among the hopeful beginnings of a national architecture.

THE END

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Art and Criticism. Monographs and Studies. ByTheodore Child. Profusely Illustrated. Large 8vo, Ornamental Cloth, $6 00.

MISS EDWARDS’S EGYPT.

Pharaohs, Fellahs, and Explorers. ByAmelia B. Edwards. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental. Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, $4 00.

CESNOLA’S CYPRUS.

Cyprus: its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples. A Narrative of Researches and Excavations during Ten Years’ Residence in that Island. By GeneralLouis Palma di Cesnola. With Appendix, containing a Treatise on “The Rings and Gems in the Treasure of Kurium,” byC. W. King, M.A.; a “List of Engraved Gems found at Different Places in Cyprus;” a Treatise “On the Pottery of Cyprus,” byA. S. Murray; Lists of “Greek Inscriptions,” “Inscriptions in the Cypriote Character,” and “Inscriptions in the Phœnician Character.” With Portrait, Maps, and 400 Illustrations. Third Edition. 8vo, Cloth, Gilt Top and Uncut Edges, $7 50.

CHURCH-BUILDING.

Historical Studies of Church-building in the Middle Ages: Venice, Siena, Florence. ByCharles Eliot Norton. 8vo, Cloth, $3 00.

ART DECORATION APPLIED TO FURNITURE.

Art Decoration Applied to Furniture. ByHarriet Prescott Spofford. With Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $4 00; Half Calf, $6 25.

ART EDUCATION APPLIED TO INDUSTRY.

Art Education Applied to Industry. ByGeo. Ward Nichols. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, Illuminated and Gilt, $4 00; Half Calf, $6 25.

WOOD-ENGRAVING.

A History of Wood-engraving. ByG. E. Woodberry. With Numerous Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, $3 50.

HINTS TO AMATEURS.

A Hand-book on Art. ByLouise Jopling. 16mo, Paper, Ornamental, 50 cents.

JARVES’S ART HINTS.

Art Hints. Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting. ByJames Jackson Jarves. 12mo, Cloth, $1 50.

PARTON’S CARICATURE.

Caricature and other Comic Art, in all Times and Many Lands. ByJames Parton. With 203 Illustrations. 8vo, Cloth, Gilt Top and Uncut Edges, $5 00; Half Calf, $7 25.

THE CERAMIC ART.

The Ceramic Art: A Compendium of the History and Manufacture of Pottery and Porcelain. ByJennie Y. Young. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $5 00.

CHARNAY’S ANCIENT CITIES.

The Ancient Cities of the New World. Being Voyages and Explorations in Mexico and Central America, from 1857 to 1882. ByDésiré Charnay. Translated byJ. GoninoandHelen S. Conant. 209 Illustrations and a Map. Royal 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, $6 00.

“THE QUIET LIFE.”Illustrated by Abbey and Parsons.

“The Quiet Life.” Certain Verses by Various Hands: the Motive set forth in a Prologue and Epilogue byAustin Dobson; the whole Adorned with Numerous Drawings byEdwin A. AbbeyandAlfred Parsons. 4to, Ornamental Leather, $7 50. (In a Box.)

OLD SONGS.Illustrated by Abbey and Parsons.

Old Songs. With Drawings byEdwin A. AbbeyandAlfred Parsons. 4to, Ornamental Leather, Gilt Edges, $7 50. (In a Box.)

SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER.Illustrated by Abbey.

She Stoops to Conquer; or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. By Dr.Goldsmith. With Photogravure and Process Reproductions from Drawings byEdwin A. Abbey. Decorations byAlfred Parsons. Introduction byAustin Dobson. Folio, Leather, Illuminated, Gilt Edges, $20 00. (In a Box.)

HERRICK’S POEMS.Illustrated by Abbey.

Selections from the Poems of Robert Herrick. With Drawings byEdwin A. Abbey. 4to, Cloth, Illuminated, Gilt Edges, $7 50. (In a Box.)

BOUGHTON AND ABBEY’S HOLLAND.

Sketching Rambles in Holland. ByGeorge H. Boughton, A.R.A. Beautifully and Profusely Illustrated with Drawings byEdwin A. Abbeyand the author. 8vo, Cloth, Illuminated, $5 00; Gilt Edges, $5 25.

SOUTH KENSINGTON.

Travels in South Kensington. With Notes on Decorative Art and Architecture in England. ByMoncure Daniel Conway. Illustrated. 8vo, Cloth, $2 50.

BEN-HUR.Illustrated.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. ByLew. Wallace. Two Volumes. Illustrated with Twenty Full-page Photogravures. Over One Thousand Illustrations as Marginal Drawings byWilliam Martin Johnson. Silk and Gold, Uncut Edges and Gilt Tops, and Contained in Specially Designed Gladstone Box, $7 00.

THE AVON.Illustrated by Parsons.

The Warwickshire Avon. Notes byA. T. Quiller-Couch. Illustrations byAlfred Parsons. Crown 8vo, Half Leather, Ornamental, Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, $2 00. (In a Box.)

WORDSWORTH’S SONNETS.Illustrated by Parsons.

A Selection from the Sonnets of William Wordsworth. With Numerous Illustrations byAlfred Parsons. 4to, Full Leather, Gilt Edges, $5 00. (In a Box.)

GIBSON’S SHARP EYES:

Sharp Eyes. A Rambler’s Calendar of Fifty-two Weeks among Insects, Birds, and Flowers. ByW. Hamilton Gibson. Illustrated by the Author. 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, $5 00. (In a Box.)

GIBSON’S STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE.

Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine. ByW. Hamilton Gibson. Illustrated by the Author. Royal 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $3 50.

GIBSON’S HAPPY HUNTING-GROUNDS.

Happy Hunting-Grounds. ByW. Hamilton Gibson. Illustrated by the Author. 4to, Cloth, Ornamental, Gilt Edges, $7 50. (In a Box.)

GIBSON’S HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS.

Highways and Byways. ByW. Hamilton Gibson. Illustrated by the Author. 4to, Cloth, Ornamental, Gilt Edges, §7 50. (In a Box.)

GIBSON’S PASTORAL DAYS.

Pastoral Days. ByW. Hamilton Gibson. Illustrated by the Author. 4to, Cloth, Ornamental, Gilt Edges, $7 50. (In a Box.)

DRAKE’S WHITE MOUNTAINS.

The Heart of the White Mountains. BySamuel Adams Drake. Illustrated byW. Hamilton Gibson. 4to, Cloth, Ornamental, Gilt Edges, $7 50. (In a Box.)

THE CHINA HUNTER’S CLUB.

The China Hunter’s Club. By the Youngest Member. Illustrated. Post 8vo, Cloth, $1 75.

BRIDGMAN’S ALGERIA.

Winters in Algeria. Written and Illustrated byFrederick Arthur Bridgman. Square 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $2 50.

SPANISH VISTAS.

Spanish Vistas. ByGeorge Parsons Lathrop. Illustrated byCharles S. Reinhart. 8vo, Ornamental Cover, Gilt Edges, $3 00.

Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York.

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