probably never yet served any more important purpose than to ease the critic’s mind. It is enough to indicate these things, and to point out that they are all produced by the strain in the minds of incompetent designers after originality and aboriginality--a purpose essentially vulgar, which would vitiate the work even of a competent designer wherever it could be detected. For although the pursuit of excellence is sure to result in novelty, the pursuit of novelty is sure not to result in excellence. The extreme instance we have cited is still an instance of a tendency to which all the younger generation of architects, of whom so much was hoped, and of whom, considering their opportunities, so little of value has come, have more or less yielded--the tendency to take themselves too seriously and their art not seriously enough, and to imagine that anything that occurs to them is for that reason good enough to build, without asking it any questions. Such caricatures of architecture as these houses would not occur to the mind of an educated architect; but when all restraints, rational and academic, are removed, even educated architects, as we have seen, will not always take the trouble to analyze their conceptions before embodying them in durable brick and stone. It is from this that it comes that, as we said awhile ago, the characteristic works of the present period are distinctly inferior to the characteristic works of the preceding period. It is not that thoroughly good buildings have not been done within the latter period, but that they are not characteristic of the period. The buildings which appear to have been done by architects, and yet fail to stand the tests either of sense or of style, date themselves infallibly as having been done since 1876. One must resort to external evidence to ascertain whether the buildings that are honorable monuments to their architects were done before or since Mr. Norman Shaw did all this mischief. First among these, one has little hesitation in placing the new buildings designed by Mr. Haight for Columbia College. Mr. Haight has not here been in pursuit of novelty, but has been content with conforming his structure to its function, and modelling the masses thus arrived at so as to heighten their inherent expression. And although he has kept within the limits of historical English Gothic in doing this, the result of the process is an individual building with a characteristic [Illustration: FROM GOVERNOR TILDEN’S HOUSE. Calvert Vaux, Architect.]