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 is meant 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 [Illustration: NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE BUILDING, MINNEAPOLIS. Babb, Cook, & Willard, Architects.]