In brief, are you attracted by any phase of modern bridge-building that copies the decorations of civic architecture, displaying columns, pilasters, niches, balustrades, battlements, towers, turrets, pinnacles, or any other finery that serves no organic purpose in the life of a contemporary bridge? Myself, I hate such a strumpet of a bridge as the Hoogesluis at Amsterdam, with her ornate spandrils, and her embossed masonry, and her balustraded parapet surmounted by a row of obelisks around which lamps are bracketed. Also I hate such a suspension bridge as the one at Conway Castle, where the metal rods that support the roadway pass through a brace of turrets on each of the embattled gateways. The effect is not only comic but ludicrous. No engineer with any sense would have put a metal viaduct within a few yards of Conway Castle. Or, if a metal suspension had been forced upon him by his employers, he would have made in a modern style a very simple and stern design. Instead, we have two vulgar gateways rudely copied from Conway Castle, and then lacerated by five metal rods that cut through each of the four turrets. I am reminded of an absurd railway bridge at Cologne, whose parapets are--or were--flanked by small turrets, and whose gateway has--or had--two high towers formidably armed with make-believe battlements and machicolations. Such futile pretension is a public insult; it implies that laymen have no common sense at all in their attitude to “feats of engineering.” But it is not the modern bridge alone that provokes criticism in this matter of decorative art. Some ancient and famous bridges are hard nuts to crack as soon as we pass from their structural fitness to their ornamentation. As an example I may choose the Ponte Sant’ Angelo at Rome, which has been copied feebly by the Schloss Brücke at Berlin. Originally the Sant’ Angelo was the Pons Ælius, built by Hadrian (A.D. 13) face to face with his mausoleum, to-day the castle of Saint Angelo. In the seventeenth century new parapets were added to the bridge, and ten colossal statues by Bernini were put up on pedestals along the parapets. Around these statues many a controversy has raged, and I am not surprised. In my photographs there is a small lamp-standard between each pair of huge figures; even the lights of Rome have to twinkle below the decorations. The bridge looks burdened rather than adorned; it is neither wide enough nor high enough to be used as a gallery for sculpture modelled on a large scale. That a great effort was made by an artist of power is evident, but the artist worked for his own ambition, and not for the Ponte Sant’ Angelo. He had no conception of the fact that the bridge and its environment were so good that they could not be improved by huge “embellishments.” Yet there are writers who say, “Yes, no doubt, Bernini’s bouncing figures are theatrical, but, after all, their general effect is grandiose.” The truth is, every