of which in the eighteenth is taken by the contemporary architects of England and America as the starting-point of the new departure in the nineteenth. It cannot be said that Mr. Norman Shaw and his followers have succeeded in the task of combining free composition with classic detail, which the Romans forbore to attempt, and in which the French architects of the sixteenth century failed. Every attempt to fit antique detail to a building faithfully designed to meet modern requirements shows that it cannot be so fitted without being transformed, and--since the sole excuse for the attempt is that it cannot be bettered--without being debased. What the Queen Anne men have done is virtually what the Romans did. They have shirked the impossible problem they unnecessarily imposed upon themselves, and have either overlaid or inlaid their buildings with their architecture. Of course the result of this process can no more be accepted as an architectural organism than if they had hung water-proof paper on the outer walls instead of decorating them with carving, or moulding, or what not, built in the walls, but no more architecturally related to them than the paper-hanging. But this is precisely what has been done in every “free classic” building, with more or less skill and dissimulation of the process. It is seldom done with the winning candor with which it has been done in the house of Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt in New York, which is officially described as a specimen of the “Greek Renaissance,” possibly because its architectural details are all Roman. In that edifice two bands of exquisite carving--exquisite in execution, that is to say--which girdle the building, simply occur on the wall at levels where they are quite meaningless in relation to the building; where, consequently, they would not help the expression of the building, if the building could be said to have any expression beyond that of settled gloom; and where the irrelevant carving, not being framed by itself, would contradict the expression of a structure which was architecturally, and not alone mechanically, a building. How much this carving would gain by being framed away, so that if it did not help, it should at least not injure, the architecture to which it is attached, may be seen by comparing these Vanderbilt houses with a brown-stone house, in formal Renaissance, in upper Fifth Avenue, near Sixty-ninth Street, where the carving is neither better cut nor more abundant than that of the Vanderbilt houses, but where its disposition at least appears to be premeditated, and not casual.