great city needs a Parliament of Taste where questions of civic art could be debated publicly, with help from lantern slides. No writer can hope to do much in his defence of art. Indeed, books are studied so infrequently that they cannot draw public attention to the larger problems of architecture and decoration; whereas free debates in a Parliament of Taste, centring always around object-lessons, might restore to art the life of a great citizen. In this matter we owe much to Hosking, the Victorian pontist, who cried out against the blunders made in the ornamentation of bridges. As early as 1842 he told the truth boldly, declaring that the most eminent civil engineers, in their efforts to take hints from street buildings, had failed to produce anything but meanness or absurdity, or a combination of both. Hosking had faith in three simple principles:-- 1. That bridges, in the combination of their leading lines, should be bold and simple; 2. That their passage over dangerous places ought to be a secure highway; and, 3. That in stone bridges far too much money had been wasted on the high finish of exterior surfaces. In very ponderous language Hosking said:-- “It may be fairly questioned whether Waterloo and London bridges would not have been finer objects had the masonry of their external faces been merely rough-axed, or even left scabbled, instead of being fair hammer-dressed; and certainly many thousands of pounds might have been saved in the execution of Waterloo Bridge, and a much better result produced, by the omission of the coupled columns and their immediate accessories, and by the use of a plain parapet of a more reasonable height, instead of the high, the enormously expensive, and absurdly ugly balustraded enclosures which now aid the columns and their projected entablatures to deform a splendid structure.” This Puritan outlook appeals to me, for I believe that good bridges should be as sternly efficient as were the Ironsides of Cromwell’s army. Their beauty is a thing apart from any cavalier-like finery of dressing ornament. It shows that all the parts of a bridge are co-ordinated with fine judgment, and that each part is in nice accord with its own work and with the great office which the bridge as a whole has to fulfil daily. When the railway viaduct at Ludgate Hill was finished, there was a public outcry because of its gaunt and shabby ugliness; but Londoners were appeased as soon as some “decorative” metalwork was nailed upon the parapets. This “ornament,” a trumpery makeshift, was supposed to have given merit to an imbecile design that disgraced the main road to St. Paul’s Cathedral. As things of this sort are allowed to happen in the heart of our great city, who can have confidence in civic authorities? What chance is there that new projects for bridges will be considered intelligently?