Probably most people who know Richardson’s name vaguely associate him with ecclesiastical work; but Richardson’s brand of romanticism was a genuine attempt to embrace the age, and in his long list of public works there are but five churches. If the Pittsburgh Court House and Trinity Church stand out as the hugest of his architectural conceptions, it is the smaller buildings that test the skill and imagination of the master, and the public libraries at North Easton, Malden, and Quincy, Mass., and some of the little railway stations in Massachusetts stand on an equally high level. Richardson pitted his own single powers against the barbarism of the Gilded Age; but, unlike his contemporaries in England, he did not turn his back upon the excellences of industrialism. “The things I want most to design,” he said to his biographer, “are a grain-elevator and the interior of a great river-steamboat.” In short, Richardson sought to dominate his age. So nearly did he succeed that in a symposium on the ten finest buildings in America, conducted by an architectural journal in the ’eighties, Richardson was given five. This was no easy victory, and, to tell the truth, it was only a partial one. The case of the State Capitol at Albany, which Richardson and Eidlitz took in hand in 1878, after five million dollars had been squandered on it in the course of ten years’ misconstruction, scarcely caricatures the conditions under which the arts struggled to exist. Begun in the style of the Roman Renaissance, the building under Richardson’s impetuous touch began to take on Romanesque proportions, only to be legislated back into Renaissance by the offended lawgivers! William Morris Hunt, then at the height of his powers, was commissioned to paint two large mural compositions for the assembly chamber of this blessed building. So much time had been spent in mismanaging the structure that Hunt was given only two months to transfer his cartouche to the panels; but he worked heroically, and, as one of his biographers says, the work was a great triumph. Great, perhaps--but temporary! “The building had fallen into the hands of a political ring, and the poor construction was revealed in the leaking of the massive roof and the settling of the whole structure. Before ten years had passed, great portions of Hunt’s paintings flaked off, and what remained was walled up behind the rebuilding necessary to avert utter ruin.” In a period like this, Richardson’s comparative success takes on heroic proportions. II With the little eddies of eclecticism, with the rage for the Mansard roof, or the introduction of German Gothic, and, a little later, the taste for Queen Anne domesticity, there is scarcely any need to deal; they represented only the dispersion of taste and the collapse of judgment which marked the Gilded Age.