from Castle Garden, is said to have exclaimed, when he came in sight of the City Hall, that “that never was built in this country,” so the stranger in Chicago is tempted to declare of its municipal building that it could not have been reared by the same race of whose building activities the other evidences surround him. This single example of Ludovican architecture recalls, as most examples of it do, Thackeray’s caricature of its Mecænas. Despoiled of its periwigs and its high heels, that is to say, of its architecture, which is easily separable from it, the building would merely lose all its character, without losing anything that belongs to it as a building. Nevertheless this municipal building has its character, and in comparison with the next most famous public building of Chicago, it vindicates the wisdom of its architect in subjecting himself to the safeguard of a style of which, moreover, his work shows a real study. The style may be absolutely irrelevant both to our needs and to our ideas, as irrelevant as the political system of Louis XIV. which it recalls. Its formulas may seem quite empty, but they gather dignity, if not meaning, when contrasted with the work of an avid “swallower of formulas,” like the architect of the Board [Illustration: THE ART INSTITUTE. Burnham & Root, Architects.] of Trade. His work is of no style, a proposition that is not invalidated by the probability that he himself would call it “American eclectic Gothic.” We all know what the untutored and aboriginal architect stretches that term to cover. There is no doubt about its being characteristically modern and American; one might say characteristically Western, if he did not recall equally free and untrammelled exuberances in the Atlantic States. But it is impossible to ascribe to it any architectural merit, unless a complete disregard for precedent is to be imputed for righteousness, whether it proceed from ignorance or from contempt. And, indeed, there are not many other structures in the United States, of equal cost and pretension, which equally with this combine the dignity of a commercial traveller with the bland repose of St. Vitus. It is difficult to contemplate its bustling and uneasy façade without feeling a certain sympathy with the mob of anarchists that “demonstrated” under its windows on the night of its opening. If they were really anarchists, it was very ungrateful of them, for one would go far to find a more perfect expression of anarchy in architecture, and it is conceivable that they were instigated by an outraged architectural critic in disguise. If that ringleader had been caught and arraigned, he could have maintained, with much better reason, the plea that Gustave Courbet made for his share in the destruction of the column of the Place Vendôme, that his opposition to the monument was not political, but æsthetic.