There is here not a question of morals, but of knowledge and competency. The restraints in architecture of a recognized school, of a prevailing style, are useful and salutary in proportion to the absence of restraint that the architect is capable of imposing upon himself. The secular tradition of French architecture, imposed by public authority and inculcated by official academics, is felt as a trammel by many architects, who, nevertheless, have every reason to feel grateful for the power of design which this same official curriculum has trained and developed. In England the fear of the archæologists and of the ecclesiologists operated, during the period of modern Gothic at least, with equal force, though without any official sanction. To be “ungrammatical,” not to adopt a particular phase of historical architecture, and not to confine one’s self to it in a design, was there the unforgivable offence, even though the incongruities that resulted from transcending it were imperceptible to an artist and obvious only to an archæologist. A designer thoroughly trained under either of these systems, and then transferred to this country as a practitioner, must feel, as many such a practitioner has in fact felt, that he was suddenly unshackled, and that his emancipation was an unmixed advantage to him; but it is none the less true that his power to use his liberty wisely came from the discipline that was now relaxed. The academic prolusions of the Beaux Arts, or the exercises of a draughtsman, have served their purpose in qualifying him for independent design. The advocates of the curriculum of the English public schools maintain that, [Illustration: PORCH IN ST. PAUL. A. H. Stem, Architect.]