fronts present--pediments triangular and curved, pediments closed and broken--and for the variety and multiplicity of the cupolas and lanterns and crestings by which the sky-line is animated into violent agitation. The features themselves cannot be “Western,” since they are by no means novel, the most recent of them dating back to Sir Christopher Wren, and it must be the combination or the remarkable profusion of “things” that constitutes the novelty and the Westernness which it was the mission of the author to introduce into our public architecture. Unfortunately there is nothing that can fairly be called combination, for the composition is but an agglomeration, “a fortuitous concourse of atoms.” We have all seen in the Eastern cities too many buildings of which crudity and recklessness were the characteristics, and which were unstudied accumulations of familiar forms, to assume that crudity and recklessness in architecture are especially “Western ideas.” If they be so, then assuredly “Western” is an opprobrious epithet, not lightly and unadvisedly to be applied to any structure. There is perhaps no other building in either city equally costly and conspicuous which merits it in the same degree with the government building at Minneapolis, at least in an architectural sense. An enterprising owner in the same city has procured the materials for a new building by permitting each contributor to inscribe his contribution with the name of the material furnished by him, and a statement of its good qualities, and these incised advertisements undoubtedly give a local color to the structure; but this Westernness is scarcely architectural. The City Hall and Court-house in St. Paul is a large and conspicuous building, the more conspicuous for being isolated in the midst of an open square; and it is unfortunate in design, or the absence of it, the arrangement of its voids and solids being quite unstudied and casual, and the aggregation quite failing to constitute a whole. There are by no means so many features in it as in the government building at Minneapolis, nor are they classic; but the architect has introduced more “things” than he was able to handle, and they are equally irrelevant to the pile and to each other, especially the tower that was intended to be the culminating feature of the composition, but which fails to fulfil its purpose from any point of view, crowning as it does a recessed angle of the front. This also is a congeries of unrelated and unadjusted parts, and, in the light of the illustrations of his meaning furnished by our official spokesman, this also may be admitted to be characteristically W----n. The same admission may reluctantly be made concerning the Chamber of Commerce in St. Paul, which consists architecturally of two very busy and bustling fronts, compiled of “features” that do not make up a physiognomy, and which stand upon a massive sash frame of plate-glass. As a matter of fact, these things