The other important features are the three great towers. Of these it is to be remembered that the central tower was an after-thought, necessitated by arrangements over which the architect had no control; otherwise it is possible that, as has been suggested, it would have been so enlarged as to form a principal feature of the design. It has been a subject of some surprise, that the general principle of symmetry followed in the plan and river front, has not been preserved in the case of the two original towers; but from the very beginning of the design this was otherwise arranged. The architect probably regarded each as an almost independent feature, likely to group not with the symmetry of the river front, but with the necessarily broken line of the land front. In their design they present a marked contrast, massiveness and grandeur being the characteristic of the Victoria tower, lightness and elegance of the clock-tower. Each has its admirers. It is perhaps generally thought that the clock-tower, from the smallness of its detail, harmonizes better with the adjacent front, while the Victoria tower, magnificent in itself, would have tended less to dwarf the rest of the building, had it stood almost independent of it, connected only by some grand cloister. Such is a brief notice of the actual features of the building. The task of criticism must be left to others. At first very greatly praised, it was for a time somewhat recklessly condemned. Already it is clear that it is taking the position due to it. Critics of very opposite schools show their appreciation, both of the difficulties of the task assigned to its architect, and the degree of success with which that object has been attained. Mr. Fergusson, in a vehement anti-Gothic chapter, regretting that the style of the building was to be Gothic at all, concludes that, “taking it all in all, it is perhaps the most successful attempt to apply mediæval architecture to modern civic purposes which has yet been carried out.” Mr. Scott, in his work on Gothic architecture, does not hesitate to speak of it as, “on the whole, the most successful of our modern public buildings.” An article in the ‘Saturday Review,’ immediately after Sir C. Barry’s death, written in kindliness of feeling, but written also with care and discrimination in criticism, expresses pretty accurately the verdict of the educated public taste. “In spite of the shortcomings, which just critical taste or captious antagonism can find in the details and the mass of the work,--in spite of the disadvantage of the primary idea of the style in which it is built having been revolutionised in the course of its progress--yet the Palace of Westminster stands alone and matchless in Europe among the architectural monuments of this busy age. From the border of the Thames, from St. James’s Park or Waterloo Place, from Piccadilly or the bridge across the Serpentine, the spectacle of that