eligible rather for admiration than for study. Assuredly designers will get nothing but good from his work if they learn from it to try for largeness and simplicity, to avoid niggling, and to consider first of all the disposition of their masses. But these are merits that cannot be transferred from a photograph. They are quite independent of a fondness for the Provençal Romanesque, and still more of an exaggeration of the depth of voussoirs and of the dwarfishness of pillars. These things are readily enough imitable, as nearly every block of dwellings in Chicago testifies, but they are scarcely worth imitating. In Richardson’s best work there is apt to be some questionable detail, since the success or failure of his building is commonly decided before the consideration of detail arises, and it is this questionable detail that the imitators are apt to reproduce without asking [Illustration: DWELLING IN LAKE SHORE DRIVE. H. H. Richardson, Architect.] it any questions. Moreover, it will probably be agreed by most students that Richardson’s city houses are, upon the whole, and in spite of some noteworthy exceptions, the least successful of his works. As it happens, there are two of them in Chicago itself, one on the north side and one on the south, and if their author had done nothing else, it is likely that they would be accepted rather as warnings than as examples. The principal front of the former has the simple leading motive that one seldom fails to find in the work of its architect, in the central open loggia of each of its three stories, flanked on each side by an abutment of solid wall, and the apportionment of the front between voids and solids is just and felicitous. Three loggie seem an excessive allowance for the town-house of a single family; but if we waive this point as an affair between the architect and his client exclusively, it must be owned that the arrangement supplies a motive susceptible of very effective development. In this case it cannot be said to have been developed effectively; nay, it can hardly be said to have been developed in an architectural sense at all, and the result proves that though a skilful disposition of masses is much, it is not everything. We have just been saying that the success or failure of Richardson’s work was in a great degree independent of the merit of the detail, but this dwelling scarcely exhibits any detail. This is the more a drawback because the loggia is a feature of which lightness and openness is the essential characteristic, and which seems, therefore, to demand a certain elegance of treatment, as was recognized alike by the architects of the Gothic and the Renaissance palaces in Italy, from which we derive the feature and the name. It is, indeed, in the contrast between the lightened and enriched fenestration of the centre and the massiveness of the flanking walls that the potential effectiveness of the arrangement resides. Here, however, there is no lightening and no enrichment.