Nothing that I have seen so cleverly portrays the young and "high art" architectural aspirant as the delineation of a character in a novel published in England under the title of "The Ambassador Extraordinary," and said to have been written by an eminent architect. With unsparing pen the author sketches a character, Georgius Oldhausen by name, F.S.A., professor of architecture of a very advanced order. The work is well executed, and we can almost see before us the architect who, disdaining such insignificant matters as good planning, stability of construction, and convenient disposition of parts, claims to be an artist pure and simple, and, leaving practical matters entirely out of the question, goes in heavily for the picturesque and pure mediaeval, Queen Anne, or Jacobean, as the case may be. Let us follow him as he conducts a friend over a church and conventual establishment in course of construction. "Your rooms," says Monsignore, "seem to me to be made almost as uncomfortable as they possibly can be." "Why, of course!" exclaims the astonished artist, fixing his glass somewhat indignantly in his eye. "What you call uncomfortable I call quaint." "Very possibly I should call it the same; but, my dear sir, _cui bono_?" "_Cui bono!_" answers the architect contemptuously. "That's what all modern people say; that's the horrible mistake of the whole modern world. We shall never recover the tone of the old men till we get rid of such jargon. Now, just for an instant, imagine the fathers of this abbey of ours going in for wash-hand-basins!" He drops his eye-glass in sheer dismay at such an idea. They next visit the refectory. Master Georgius here excels himself. "I'm going in for doing it inside in red brick, and vaulting it in red brick too, with black diaper-patterns all over, you know." "How pretty!" "I hope not," (dropping his glass.) "The diapers will be quite irregular, and full of what you would very likely call mistakes." "A sort of intentional accidents, George." "Yes; not a bad term. And then the joints will be all raked out roughly, and the brick-work smeared, you know. I have quite a new idea about that. I mean to go in for letting the workmen have the use of all the rooms, with liberty to smudge them as much as they like; and so at the end we shall have a sort of antique effect, you know." "They will be dirty." "You may call it dirt," says Georgius, refixing his eye-glass. "I call it art. And there will be marks here and there where the fellows have lighted fires, you know." "And caricatures on the walls, I suppose." "Of course. I shall go in for that very much. I shall offer a prize for the quaintest. I'll have them done with a brush of paint, you know, or scratch them with a screw-driver, and so on. I call that real art." "So it is, George."