turret. It is a good lesson in architecture to find that the effect of a whole may be so much impaired by one of the most successful of the parts, and that even when “the thing” is really rich and rare, we may still be unsatisfied how it “got there.” Happily neither this shortcoming, nor shortcomings much graver, could prevent such a work as this from being an ornament to the city, and an honorable monument to its architect. Perhaps it is because Mr. Post, the architect of the house of Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt, has not attempted so much as Mr. Hunt that his work may be called at once more successful and less interesting. In color it has more and in design less of variety. For the monotony of gray wall and black roof it substitutes red brick, with wrought work of the same gray limestone employed in the house we have been talking of, and with a red slated roof broken by great stone dormers. It is much more simple and compact in composition than the other, for the main house is a parallelogram brought together under one great four-hipped roof, and the wing is here a very subordinate appendage. It is thus much simpler, much more within the conventional decorum of a town mansion in its scheme, while it is equally far from having the appearance of having been designed by contract, and is studied with equal thoroughness, although with a very different motive. In the matter of color, it is undeniable that the brick-work has in places a patchy look by reason of the comparatively small quantities in which it is used, the whole front on the avenue being virtually of highly wrought stone, and it seems clear that the building would have gained if the brick had been omitted altogether from this front. On the street front the mode of treatment adopted might very possibly have made the building dull and monotonous if it had been built in monochrome, as assuredly the addition of a strong contrast of color would have made the more varied design of the other painfully restless. In style the two buildings offer a curious resemblance and a curious contrast. This also is a French château, but a French château of the period after the transition, when all detail had been thoroughly classicized, and only a romantic wilfulness and freedom of composition recalled the architecture of the Middle Ages. Here are the shell frieze of Blois and the fish-bladder tracery of Orleans, without the Gothic detail which in the French Renaissance is so often found side by side with them. The carving here, equally well executed for its purpose, does not appeal so much to admiration for its execution, for the reason that it is all strictly architectural, and not directly imitative. In design it is for its purpose equally well studied; in scale, indeed, is much better studied, so that the detail, which is often lost in the ineffectual minuteness of the carving in the former case, here takes its place with emphasis. Perhaps in some