One of the worst faults of English architects is that when they have a building of great width, they put a portico or some such ‘feature’ in the centre and another at each end, and thus destroy the broad effect of width without creating an effect of height. The old Museum at Berlin was more imposing with its eighteen columns in a single line than the British Museum with its forty-four in different lines projecting at the centre and the ends; and with a colonnade the whole width of Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery might not have been unworthy of its site. At the Imperial Institute there is a tower in the middle and a tower near each end. The towers would be commendable, if they stood out alone; but the main building detracts from their effect of height, and they detract from its effect of breadth: and this is waste. Yet a tower does not impair the effect, if it divides a long front into two unequal parts, like the Rath-haus tower at Leipzig, built in 1556. I cannot understand why this is so, but observation has convinced me that it is a fact. Architecture is not to be picked up from books: you have to go to see the buildings for yourself. There are books condemning the corners of the Valmarana Palace at Vicenza, and these certainly look feeble in Palladio’s design. The design just shows the building by itself; but really it is in a street, with lower buildings on each side of it. The corners carry your eyes down to these, and are exactly right. In contrast with the Valmarana, the Casa del Diavolo has a most uncompromising corner, as if Palladio meant the building to look higher than it really is, and dwarf all its surroundings. Apparently, it was to have six columns along the front with five narrow windows squeezed in between them, but it has only three columns and two windows: the rest was never built. They are gigantic columns on high pedestals; and these vertical lines do as much for the effect of height here as the horizontal lines of the Basilica for its effect of breadth. There is also a house at Exeter (84, Queen Street) which I always call the Casa del Diavolo, with no aspersions on the occupier or the owner, but just because it is a little like that building at Vicenza. It has only four columns, though wide enough for five or six: its windows are too wide, and the columns have no pedestals; and thus it misses most of the effect of the real thing.