site which you would certainly admit to be magnificent. If I could have ventured on any recommendation concerning Art, I should have pleaded before the Royal Commission for a Chair of Architecture here. It might endow us with some forms of beauty; it might at all events endow us with rules for building a room in which you can be heard, one in which you can breathe, and a chimney which would not smoke. I said that in America the most pretentious buildings were the worst. Another source of failure in buildings, in dress, and not in these alone, is servile imitation of Europe. In northern America the summer is tropical, the winter is arctic. A house ought to be regular and compact in shape, so as to be easily warmed from the centre, with a roof of simple construction, high pitched, to prevent the snow from lodging, and large eaves to throw it off,--this for the arctic winter, for the tropical summer you want ample verandas, which, in fact, are the summer sitting rooms. An American house built in this way is capable at least of the beauty which belongs to fitness. But as you see Parisian dresses under an alien sky, so you see Italian villas with excrescences which no stove can warm, and Tudor mansions with gables which hold all the snow. It is needless to say what is the result, when the New World undertakes to reproduce not only the architecture of the Old World, but that of classical Greece and Rome, or that of the Middle Ages. Jefferson, who was a classical republican, taught a number of his fellow citizens to build their homes like Doric temples, and you may imagine what a Doric temple freely adapted to domestic purposes must be. But are these attempts to revive the past very successful anywhere? We regard as a decided mistake the revived classicism of the last generation. May not our revived mediaevalism be regarded as a mistake by the generation that follows us? We could all probably point to some case in which the clashing of mediaeval beauties with modern requirements has produced sad and ludicrous results. There is our own museum; the best, I suppose, that could be done in the way of revival; the work of an architect whom the first judges deemed a man of genius. In that, ancient form and modern requirements seem everywhere at cross purposes. Nobody can deny that genius is impressed upon the upper part of the front, which reminds one of a beautiful building in an Italian city, though the structure at the side recalls the mind to Glastonbury, and the galaxy of chimneys has certainly no parallel in Italy. The front ought to stand in a street, but as it stands in a field its flanks have to be covered by devices which are inevitably weak. What is to be done with the back always seems to me one of the darkest enigmas of the future. The basement is incongruously plain and bare, in the street it would perhaps be partly hidden by the passengers. Going in, you find a beautiful mediaeval court struggling hard for its life