An edifice for a gallery or museum of art should be fire-proof, sufficiently isolated for light and effective ornamentation, and constructed so as to admit of indefinite extension. Its chief feature should be the suitable accommodation and exhibition of its contents. But provision should be made for its becoming eventually in architectural effect consistent with its object. The skeleton of such a building need not be costly. Its chief expense would be in its ultimate adornment with marble facings, richly colored stones, sculpture or frescoes, according to a design which should enforce strict purity of taste and conformity to its motive. This gradual completion, as happened to the mediæval monuments of Europe, could be extended through many generations, which would thus be linked with one another in a common object of artistic and patriotic pride gradually growing up among them, as a national monument, with its foundations deeply laid in a unity of feeling and those desirable associations of love and veneration which in older civilizations so delightfully harmonize the past with the present. Each epoch of artists would be instructed by the skill of its predecessor, and stimulated to connect its name permanently with so glorious a shrine. Wealth, as in the days of democratic Greece and Italy, would be lavished upon the completion of a temple of art destined to endure as long as material can defy time, a monument of the people's taste and munificence. There would be born among them the spirit of those Athenians who said to Phidias, when he asked if he should use ivory or marble for the statue of their protecting goddess, "Use that material which is most _worthy_ of our city."