On the ground of economy and fitness alone our humbler streets call aloud for improvement; and if it is said that England is now a nation of shopkeepers, it must be remembered that Venice was too, and that in the days of its greatest architectural grandeur. Indeed, when she began to decay, her arts declined too. Mr. Beresford Hope, in some admirable remarks delivered at the Town Hall, Hanley, said “he wished to show them that the world’s debt to art was one in which they all had a share. It was a joint-stock company, in which every man, woman, and child, had a share, which he or she might pay up with a perfect certainty of ample return. By art he meant the science of beauty in material things,--that art which was something for the artist and something for the people themselves--which stood in no need of being separated from the everyday wear and bustle of common life--which had to do with buying and selling, with marrying and giving in marriage, with lying down and getting up, with buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market, with all the wear and tear of everyday life,--instead of being something separate from this. Art is beauty, but it is also economy and appropriateness. Art is the faculty of being able with the greatest economy of material, of colour, and invention, to be able to produce the brightest effects.” “In Kent,” he further on says, “there is a traditionary way of building chimneys, by a simple variation in the management of common bricks, but the effects produced are most picturesque; any common labourer could do it, but it is true art.” Mr. Hope then takes a row of houses in Birmingham, or Manchester, or Bradford. They were so many houses put up--no outline or skyline,--“The same dread, dreary, uniform, colourless square block, the same square doors, brass knockers and door plates, the same sash windows, the same stone slab under the windows, the same chimneys, and when they went inside, the same rhubarb-coloured oilcloth on the passage, the same rooms with the same paper on the walls, and the same chimney-piece.” This is truly and well said. It is almost impossible to feel otherwise than weary and dull on the brightest summer’s day in Liverpool. Architectural dreariness is carried to the highest pitch of which it is capable in this town, though some parts of Birkenhead rival it. Now, as has been already remarked, Chester is not only a delightful city to walk in, a city which it is a pleasure to have any business to transact in, but its arrangement and the unstudied variety of its houses make it serviceable and economical. The shifting, broken skyline, and the gables of the houses projecting as it were in amicable rivalry into the street, are always pleasant and cheerful to behold. If it is asked whether such a style of building would seriously be recommended in a practical point of view, I would say again and again it should. The Chester architects have quite adopted the indigenous