part of the outfit of a journeyman. Although Jefferson complained that in his time and in rural Virginia it was impossible to “find a workman who could draw an order,” it is evident that there was no difficulty of that kind in other parts of the country. These trained workmen, it is to be noted, were all carpenters, and there is probably no work in stone which shows an equal precision and facility in workmanship. Such buildings as the New York City Hall and the Albany Academy were clearly the work of architects of culture according to the standard of the time. The only architectural qualities of the works of the mechanics were the moderation and respectability of detail, which they had learned as part of their trade, and it is quite absurd to ascribe to these buildings any value as works of art. It is particularly absurd to assign the degradation of house-building which undoubtedly followed, and which made the typical American house, after the Greek temple had spent its force, the most vulgar habitation ever built by man, to the substitution of book-learned architects for handicraftsmen. People talk as if the middle part of Fifth Avenue, the brown-stone high-stoop house with its bloated detail, which displaced the prim precision of the older work, had been done by educated architects. In fact, there was hardly a single building put up in New York after the design of an educated architect between the works we have mentioned and the erection of Trinity Church by Mr. Upjohn in 1845, which not only marked a great advance over anything that had been done before, but began the Gothic revival to which we directly or indirectly owe whatever of merit has been done since, including so much of Queen Anne as, not being Queen Anne, is good. But the bulk of the building which gave its architectural character to New York and to the country continued to be done by mechanics, who continued, so far as they could, to supply the demand of the market, who gradually lost the training their predecessors had enjoyed, and who lost also all sense of the necessity for that training in the new demand that their work should be, above all things, “American.” As the slang of to-day puts it, they were exhorted, as the architects are still sometimes exhorted, to “talk United States.” They might have answered that there was no such language, and that a few bits of slang did not constitute a poetical vocabulary. The feeling which urges an artist to be patriotic by being different from other people not long ago led Mr. Walt Whitman to resent the absence of an “autochthonous” poetry, and has lately led a newspaper writer to call the attention of a New England building committee to the log cabin as the most suitable motive for a town-hall they are going to build.