upon business principles, used merely as a means to an end, and that end financial success--a state of things which has retarded the development of American Renaissance more than any other one factor--but this leads me back again to art and commercialism, to which I have already consecrated a chapter of this review. Let us consider for the present only the different kinds of architects we have in America, so differently equipped as to cause positive amazement while cataloguing them. What diversity of talent confronts us! talent, in some cases, one would say, that scarcely concerned architecture. I can think of no other profession which has quite so many branch specialists. Incredible as it may seem, there are prominent and successful architects--trained architects of ability--who are able to draw plans but who cannot draw elevations, and others who can draw elevations but cannot plan. There are architects who are skilful draughtsmen who cannot design, architects who can design but cannot draw at all, architects who can only write specifications and superintend--two very important branches of the profession, however, that usually go together--while stranger still, there are practising architects who can neither design nor draw nor write specifications nor even superintend, but who possess a wonderful business aptitude and personal magnetism by which they command clients for their partners or draughtsmen who actually prepare the drawings and the other instruments of service. This class of architects is, by no means, confined to America or to the epoch.[8] As long ago as the reign of Louis XIV in France, Jules Hardouin Mansart was a shining example of the financier-architect. The description of him given in Miss Wormeley’s admirable translation of the memoirs of Saint-Simon[9] is so intensely interesting that I believe I cannot do better than to quote the fragments which succeed: PLATE XCII. [Illustration: BILTMORE IN NORTH CAROLINA. RICHARD MORRIS HUNT, Architect.] PLATE XCIII. [Illustration: HOUSE OF H. W. POOR, TUXEDO PARK, N. Y. T. HENRY RANDALL, Architect.] “He [Hardouin Mansart] was ignorant of his business. De Coste, his brother-in-law, whom he made head architect, knew no more than he. They got their plans, designs and ideas from a designer of building named L’Assurance whom they kept, as much as they could, under lock and key. Mansart’s cunning [his name was probably assumed for what we would call in America an ‘ad.’] lay in coaxing the king by apparent trifles into long and costly enterprises, and by showing him incomplete plans, especially for the gardens, which instantly captured his mind, and caused him to make suggestions: then Mansart would exclaim that he never should have thought of what the king proposed, went into raptures, declared he was a scholar compared to him, and so made the king tumble whichever way he planned without suspecting it.” * * * * *