to its function and position, and none of it exquisite in modelling. It is also intelligible that he may have been dissatisfied with some parts even of his still more successful house at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street, which, always a grateful object, has lately acquired an air of additional distinction from the eager architectural competition which has set in alongside of it, and the results of which give an air of unquestionable animation--the animation of excited controversy--to Fifty-seventh Street from Fifth to Sixth Avenue. This dissatisfaction, if the architect underwent it, was a wholesome discontent which we should have expected to see allayed by more thoroughly studied detail in Mr. Harney’s succeeding work. But it seems to have been a morbid sensitiveness to the defects of his work which led Mr. Harney to abandon altogether, and in despair, the practice of architectural design, and, when he had another commercial building to do, to erect in Wall Street an entirely ineffectual structure, of which the architecture that one carries away with him consists in a crow-stepped gable, an irrelevant entablature appliqué which crosses the building half-way up, and windows covered with flat arches, the key-stones of which are “shored up” by the mullions; and, when he had another city house to do, to depute the design of it to some unknown carpenter who died before he was born, and to reproduce accurately in Madison Avenue a Vandam or Charlton Street house built out of due time, with a familiar “old New York” doorway, in the jambs of which quoins intercept sheaves of mouldings. This confession that a carpenter of 1825 was a better-trained designer than an educated architect of 1880 is very possibly creditable to the personal modesty of the latter; but Mr. Harney’s own earlier works sufficiently testify that it does not do him justice.