It would scarcely be worth while to point out the faults of designs, if they can even be described as such, so generally disesteemed as those of the two houses built for Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt, “those boxes of brown stone with architecture appliqué.” But it is worth pointing out that the radical error, which in these appears so crudely and naïvely as to be patent to the wayfaring man who has never thought about architecture, is latent in all the works of the Queen Anne movement--to which these houses do not specifically belong--and must vitiate every attempt to adjust classic detail to free and modern composition. Classic detail cannot grow out of modern structures faithfully designed for modern purposes as it grows out of antique structure, or as Gothic ornament grows out of Gothic structure, like an efflorescence. It must be “adjusted” as visibly an after-thought, and to say this is to say that in all Queen Anne buildings the architecture is appliqué. However, to disparage Queen Anne is not to explain its acceptance. It looks like a mere masquerade of nineteenth-century men in eighteenth-century clothes, and with many of its practitioners it is no more. In England it seems to have originated as a caprice by which a clever and dashing but by no means epoch-making architect misled the younger and weaker of his brethren. In this country, which had never been much more architecturally than an English colony, there seemed special reasons for following the new fashion of being old-fashioned. American architects, and American builders before there were any American architects, had been exhorted, as they have lately been exhorted again, to do something distinctively American. The colonial building, which was done by trained English mechanics, was of the same character as the contemporary domestic work of England, and showed in its ornament the same unreflecting acceptance of a set of forms and formulæ bequeathed as a tradition of the trade and [Illustration: RECESSED BALCONY, W. H. VANDERBILT’S HOUSE, FIFTH AVENUE. Herter Brothers, Architects.]