An American Protestant church nearly as long as Cologne (and such is the dimension proposed for the Cathedral of New York) is obviously far beyond the limits of a convenient auditorium, and beyond the ritual requirements of the Episcopal Church. In such a structure the space occupied by the largest congregation that can be assembled within the sound of a single voice is but a fragment, and such a congregation itself but an incident to be recognized and provided for, indeed, but by no means to be allowed to become the chief object of design. But the aim of these remarks has been to show that it is by its success as an architectural monument that the cathedral must be justified, if it is to be justified at all. In this point of view the very excess, which in any utilitarian point of view is wasteful, becomes an element of impressiveness as being an emphatic rejection in a building erected to the glory of God, of “the nicely calculated less or more” that is suitable and inevitable to buildings erected primarily for the use of man. II Mr. Richardson’s design for the Cathedral of All-Saints at Albany is herewith so fully illustrated as to enable the architect to estimate the effect the interior would have had in execution, and the untrained reader to form an impression of the exterior effect, which, however [Illustration: EAST ELEVATION.] incomplete, can scarcely be misleading. The design is, perhaps, the most suggestive contribution that has thus far been made to the solution of the architectural problem of a modern cathedral which the diocese of New York has undertaken. At all events, the influence of it was more easy to be traced in the designs for that work than the influence of any building actually erected on this side of the ocean. In part this was due to the merits of the design itself; in part to the immense vigor and large picturesqueness of the executed works of its author--qualities that have so impressed themselves upon the younger generation of American architects that there is scarcely a contemporary work of importance that does not betray his influence, and that the Provençal Romanesque, in which his personal power of design was manifested, may already be said almost to have become the style of the country. It must be manifest, however, that it would be an injustice to Mr. Richardson’s memory to take his design for the Albany Cathedral as his contribution to the civic--one may almost say the national--problem of the present. For this design was prepared under rigid limitations of space and of cost; and though its rejection is said to have been due to its excess of these latter, it is by no means what its author would have devised for a project in which there is no limitation. The Cathedral of All-Saints was to be rather a parish church of unusual dimensions than a cathedral; and the dimensions were still so restricted, and “seating capacity” still so important, that the accommodation of the congregation became a main