Ruskin’s eloquence stimulated untrained American designers to produce, in which the restlessness of unstudied forms is still further tormented by the spotty application of color. From this variety of Victorian Gothic Chicago is happily free. A gabled building in brick and sandstone opposite the Palmer House is almost a unique, and not at all an unfavorable, example. The business streets that are now merely dismal would have been much more aggressively painful if the incapable architects who built them had deviated from the comparative safety of their cast-iron Renaissance into a style that put them upon their individual want of resources. Moreover, throughout the commercial quarter any attempt at a structural use of color is sure shortly to be frustrated by coal-smoke. Upon the whole, it is a matter for congratulation that the earlier rebuilders of [Illustration: THE FIELD BUILDING. H. H. Richardson, Architect.] Chicago, being what they were, should have been so ignorant or careless of what was going on elsewhere, which, had they been aware of it, they would have been quite certain to misapply. Not only did they thus escape the frantic result that came of Victorian Gothic in untutored hands, but they escaped the pettiness and puerility that resulted of “Queen Anne,” even when it was done by designers who ought to have known better. These pages contain a disparagement of that curious mode of building in a paper written when it was dressed in its little brief authority and playing its most fantastic tricks. Now it is so well recognized that Queen Anne is dead, that it seems strange educated architects ever could have fancied they detected the promise and potency of architectural life in her cold remains. This most evanescent of fashions seems never to have prevailed in Chicago at all.