It is not within the province of this review to enter into a discussion of the problem of housing commercialism. It is odd that nobody hints how posterity is going to laugh at us, censure our cupidity, and eventually raze every one of our hideous “sky-scrapers” that shall be left standing. It is odd that the present congestion of Manhattan as a crime against decency, with all the idle land that is adjacent and available, is not painfully manifest in this so-called year of grace MCMIV. But it is within the province of this review to say that whenever the soaring kind of architecture precipitated itself upon the Anglo-Saxon dwelling-house there was a tremendous crash and revolution. It was telescoped, it was flattened--grotesquely flattened, but still it was remarkable for ingenuity, for cleverness, and, above everything, for novelty, as would be a dwelling-house loaned by another planet. So strange, indeed, this newly-invented architecture grew that it became simply impossible to prevail upon ancestral ghosts, legends and folk-lore, that habitually are part and parcel of the habitation of man, to have anything to do with a device _à la mode_ that appeared to be in every way so very much better suited to the needs of a Roman bath-house after the manner of Alma Tadema. The following lines from Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ulalume” may aptly express the injured feelings of those sentimental amenities: “Oh, hasten!--oh, let us not linger! Oh, fly!--let us fly!--for we must.” PLATE VII. [Illustration: AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. ANALYSIS. Moresque Spain 0 per cent. Moresque Algiers 0 “ Moresque California Mission 0 “ East Indian 0 “ Newly reclaimed land 0 “ Chinese ornament 0 “ Modern invention 0 “ Anglo-Saxon home atmosphere 100 “] PLATE VIII. [Illustration: THE NEWLY INVENTED ARCHITECTURE. ANALYSIS. Moresque Spain 10 per cent. Moresque Algiers 10 “ Moresque California Mission 10 “ East Indian 5 “ Newly reclaimed land 10 “ Chinese ornament 5 “ Modern invention, pure 50 “ Anglo-Saxon home atmosphere 00 “] [Illustration: EASTOVER TERRACE AND PERISTYLE.] For convenient reference of the reader a sample of this newly-invented architecture is respectfully submitted (Plate VIII), and a very clever sample it is. The inventors of the style themselves could have done no better; only the irresistible melancholy in the rhyming of Poe’s poem is not easily put out of the head, especially when, as in this case, it happens to be extremely appropriate. So let us continue: “And we passed to the end of a vista, But were stopped by the door of a tomb-- By the door of a legended tomb.”