It was Euphues who described the old bridge as “a continuall streete, well replenyshed with large and stately houses on both sides.” To-day we have one bridge well replenished with houses (unless the vandalism of trade has made a recent feast of it), but its architecture is not large and stately. I refer to William Pulteney’s Bridge at Bath, an experiment of the eighteenth century, when amateurs trifled with architecture, and architects trifled with amateurs. The structure is sedately prim and dull, but yet it is admirable, for it has tried to renew in England a generative tradition that links every housed bridge to the earliest lake-villages. So I am glad to say that the crippled old buildings on the High Bridge at Lincoln--a favourite subject of Peter de Wint--have been restored. This work was done, and done very well, thirteen years ago, under the direction of two architects, and a long account of the repairs, with a full-page illustration, was published in “The Builder,” March 21, 1903. The illustration shows the back view of the houses with the bridge beneath and beyond. The restoration is conservative and excellent, but time alone can mellow it from a thorough newness into a ripe completeness. Even then it will be a poor little monument when compared with its Florentine superior the Ponte Vecchio, which history gives to Taddeo Gaddi and the fourteenth century. The Ponte Vecchio has but one fault--the long and level roof, which has two parallel lines of a most unpliant straightness. Why should an architect put himself at odds with the curved witchery that Nature gives to her sky-lines and horizons? In other respects the Ponte Vecchio has a charming citizenship haunted by romance. Even the beaked piers are not too large, though they are said to date from the year 1355. Perhaps they were remodelled by Renaissance art; certainly they have a style not unlike that of the great Ammanati. As for the three arches, they are well balanced, their roadway has a gentle slope, and their shape goes about half-way between a cycloid and a surbased round arch. The cycloid form appears in the arches of another Florentine bridge, Ammanati’s masterpiece, the incomparable Ponte della Trinità. Some of the many-windowed tiny cots that project from the parapet of the Ponte Vecchio seem to be stuffy compromises between tombs and homes; they would be fit resting-places for the occasional ghosts that men of science welcome, after infinite hesitation unrelieved by humour.