The sculptural decoration, in contradistinction to that strictly architectural, equally abounds. By sculptural decoration is meant that designed as well as executed by the sculptor, and in regard to which the only care of the architect is to provide places for it, and so to frame it that, if it does not help, it may not injure, the architecture to which it is attached. It is not too much to say of this that it is much the most important and interesting work in decorative sculpture which is to be seen out-of-doors in New York. The most noteworthy piece of it, perhaps, is the procession of cherubic musicians girdling the frieze-like band of the corbel which carries the oriel of the southern front.[D] The execution elsewhere, in the panels under and between the windows, and in the pilasters of the bay, is equally good, but the design is nowhere else so effective. One need not be a purist, indeed, to find fault with the introduction of these pilasters at the angles of the bay and on the curve of the oriel, which are so clearly not structural members, actual or symbolic, and which are so clearly introduced for the sake of the ornament they bear, although he may condone the fault for the prettiness of the ornament generally in design, and its unfailing care and delicacy of execution. The only criticism possible, indeed, upon the execution of this work is, that it is too exquisite, and reduces the texture of carved stone too nearly to the more facile surface of moulded clay. One’s admiration of Mr. Hunt’s spirited and scholarly design does not indeed cease with the walls of the house; but it must be owned that it undergoes some modification above the cornice. It cannot be said that the sky-line is so effective as might have been expected from what is beneath it. There is an undeniable piquancy about the statued gable which terminates the roof of the principal mass, and the relation between this roof and the steep hood of the turret is picturesque, taken alone. Unfortunately, it cannot be taken alone, and the effect of the whole series of roofs is not a harmonious grouping, but--there is no other word for it--a “huddle.” It is in the roof, too, that the shortcomings of the architect in the solution of what may be called his academic problem are most apparent. The style of his work is the transitional style of France, the modification of mediæval architecture under the influence of the Italian Renaissance, until what was all Gothic at the beginning of the transition had become all classic at its close. This is, in fact, an attempt to summarize in one building the history of a most active and fruitful century in the history of architecture, which included the late Gothic of the fifteenth century and the early Renaissance of the sixteenth, and spanned the distance from the minute and complicated modelling of the Palais de Justice at Rouen and the Hôtel Cluny at Paris, to the romantic classicism of the great châteaux of the Loire.