Though no achievement comparable in size and importance to the scheme of the Thames Embankment is associated with this period, new architectural features were not wanting; foremost among them were Street's new Law Courts, the swan-song in stone of the Gothic revival; a group of buildings dignified in conception and treatment, but terribly handicapped by their internal discomforts and darkness. I have already spoken of the "Griffin." Cleopatra's Needle was at last set up on the Embankment in 1878, and remains to this day a standing proof of the doubtful wisdom of detaching ancient historic monuments from their surroundings. There is something forlorn in this relic of Ptolemaic Egypt, as it faces the winking sky signs of the Surrey side. To the late 'seventies belongs another architectural innovation destitute of beauty, and only remarkable for its size and height--Queen Anne's Mansions. The invincible conservatism of the English could not be more strikingly displayed than by the fact that after more than forty years Queen Anne's Mansions remains our solitary skyscraper. The El Dorado which this method of economizing space offers to landlords and builders has never been exploited. Some put it down to our sense of the æsthetic fitness of things; others to the paralysing effect of building laws, vested interests, and the dead hand of "ancient lights." Sir Martin Conway, as becomes one who has scaled high peaks in both hemispheres, has recently come forward as an apostle of altitude in architecture, but so far without much response. _Punch_ had no quarrel with anything about Queen Anne's Mansions except their ugliness, and unreservedly withdrew the charge of irregular financial procedure which he had brought--on the strength of _The Times_--against the projector and original proprietor, Mr. Hankey.