It is perhaps not a little odd that despite its pre-eminent importance, and the high rank which it has ever assumed, from that early time when the first rays of dawning civilization began to warm the latent germs of culture and refinement in human nature, to the present day, it is the only art that has not, with very rare and isolated exceptions, stamped renown upon those who have practised it as a profession, and lifted the artist into the lasting remembrance and gratitude of the admirers of his works. How greatly the painter, the sculptor, the musician, are identified with their arts, and the products of their brush, chisel or pen! how great has been their praise, how lasting and unstinted the esteem in which they have been held! but how reserved has been the applause that has encouraged the architect who has given to the world the grand and noble results of his skill and genius, and how soon he himself has been forgotten! It happens only too often that it is the name of the distinguished painter that stamps the value of his canvas rather than the merits of the picture itself. The title of a beautiful piece of sculptured marble is not asked with greater eagerness than that of the artist who created it. Bach and Beethoven and Mozart are played and sung to the popular audiences rather than their fugues, their sonatas and their symphonies. But what is known of the artists who have reared the greatest monuments of enduring architecture? Their personality, and even their names, appear to have faded from popular recollection. This seems to have been the fact from the earliest days of the art in Greece and Rome to the present time. The exceptions are so rare, throughout all the intervening ages, and the waving prominence of the art, that they might almost be numbered upon the fingers of a single hand. The reader, if he is not a professional architect, or an amateur who has read deeply in his favorite subject, can arrive at the truth of this seemingly exaggerated statement, if he will lay aside this book for a moment and try to recall the names of the designers of some of the more conspicuous monuments of architecture he has visited at home or abroad.