composition whatever, and the effect is so scattering, and the whole is so fortuitous an aggregation of unrelated parts, that it is impossible to describe the houses or to remember them when one's back is turned. Their fragments only recur to memory as the blurred images of a hideous dream. So one recalls the Batavian grace of the bulbous gables, the oriel-windows so set as to seem in imminent danger of toppling out, the egg and dart moulding niggled up and down jambs of brickwork connected by flat openings with protruding key-stones, the whip-lashes cut in sandstone blocks, the decorative detail fished from the slums of the Rococo. These are not subjects for architectural criticism; they call for the intervention of an architectural police. They are cases of disorderly conduct done in brick and brown stone. Hazardous as the superlative degree generally is, it is not much of a hazard to say that they are the most thoroughly discreditable buildings ever

erected in New York, and it is to be noted that they are thoroughly characteristic of the period. Such a nightmare might perhaps have entered the brain of some speculative builder during the wildest vulgarity of the brown-stone period, but he would not have had the effrontery to build it, being deterred by the consideration that nobody would face public ridicule by consenting to live in it. Some speculator is, however, convinced that there is now a market for a house which stands upon the street corner and screeches for people to come and look at it when there is nothing in it worth looking at; and we must take shame to ourselves from the reflection that the speculator may be right in counting upon this extreme vulgarization of the public taste, and that, at any rate, there is no police to prevent the emission of the screech upon the public highway.

This is the result of a demand for "something new" upon a mind incapable of producing anything good. The screech is the utterance of the Sweet Singer of Michigan exhorted not to mind about grammar, but "to fix her verses

to the gauge of the round globe. It is an extreme instance, to be sure, but there are others only less discreditable, and only to be dealt with in the way of what is called "slashing" criticism, which probably never yet served any more important purpose than to ease the critic's mind. It is enough to indicate these things, and to point out that they are all produced by the strain in the minds of incompetent designers after originality and aborigi nality a purpose essentially vulgar, which would vitiate the work even of a competent designer wherever it could be detected. For although the pursuit of excellence is sure to result in novelty, the pursuit of novelty is sure not to result in excellence. The extreme instance we have cited is still an instance of a tendency to which all the younger generation of architects, of whom so much was hoped, and of whom, considering their opportunities, so little of value has come, have more or less yielded-the tendency to take themselves too seriously and their art not se

riously enough, and to imagine that anything that occurs to them is for that reason good enough to build without asking it any questions. Such caricatures of architecture as these houses would not occur to the mind of an educated architect; but when all restraints, rational and academic, are removed, even educated architects, as we have seen, will not always take the trouble to analyze their conceptions before embodying them in durable brick and stone. It is from this that it comes that, as we said awhile ago, the characteristic works of the present period are distinctly inferior to the characteristic works of the preceding period. It is not that thoroughly good buildings have not been done within the latter period, but that they are not characteristic of the period. The buildings which appear to have been done by architects, and yet fail to stand the tests either of sense or of style, date themselves infallibly as having been done since 1876. One must resort to external evidence to ascertain whether the buildings that are honorable monuments to their architects were done before or since Mr. Norman Shaw did all this mischief.

First among these one has little hesitation in placing the new buildings designed by Mr. Haight for Columbia College. Mr. Haight has not here been in pursuit of novelty, but has been content with conforming his structure to its function, and modelling the masses thus arrived at so as to heighten their inherent expression. And although he has kept within the limits of historical English Gothic in doing this, the result of the process is an individual building with a characteristic expression of its own, the most successful piece of Gothic design that has been done in New York since Mr. Withers designed the Jefferson Market Court-house. In Queen Anne, as we saw, Mr. Haight's work was not very distinguishable from the work of a very different architect. With a vocabulary limited to fifty words, not much can be expressed. But when he permits himself the use of language, it is seen that Mr. Haight can express thoughts. In composition and in detail these buildings are thoroughly studied and thoroughly effective. In the earlier, a street front of a whole block on Madison Avenue, the designer has resisted the temptation to diversify his building into unrest, but has built a wall of three stories in red brick and light sandstone, the broad and quiet aspect of which is enhanced by

the grouping of the openings, and not disturbed by the chimney-stacks and the oriel and the turret which animate the composition. The later building, of the same materials, has been built for the library of the college, and the large hall which contains this is in effect the building. This is treated with equal skill, and to the same result of cloistral repose, of harmony and dignity and grace. These vigorous and refined works show, if the showing were needed, except by the architects of the new departure, that vigor does

"correct" Gothic is not, to our mind, either a merit or a defect. But it shows how wide is the range of expression possible in the architecture of the Middle Ages, and of its pliability to modern uses, that without a departure from precedent the needs of an American college in the nineteenth century can be completely answered in that architecture; for there is no innovation in Mr. Haight's work, unless we include the iron roof, which is partly visible from the floor of the hall. There are one or two "survivals" of forms which have lost their functions, as the unpierced pinnacled turrets at the angles of the library building and the crenellated parapet of the porch in the quadrangle. But upon the whole the result upon which the college and its architect are to be congratulated has been attained by following the advice of the sculptor who informed his pupil that the art was not difficult: "You simply take a piece of marble and leave out what you don't want." Mr. Haight has taken what he wanted in Gothic architecture for the uses of Columbia College, and with the trivial exceptions we have noted has left out the rest. And what is true of this work is equally true of an unpretending and picturesque piece of late Gothic, erected from Mr. Haight's designs for St. Thomas's School, in East Fifty-ninth Street.

Another interesting piece of Gothic work, though this time of distinctly Victorian Gothic, is the house designed by Mr. Vaux for Governor Tilden. The interest of this, however, is rather in the detail of form and color than in general composition, since the building is architecturally only a street front, and since the slightness of the projections and the lack of visible and emphasized depth in the wall itself give it the appearance rather of a screen than of one face of a building, and the small gables which surmount it too evidently exist for the sole purpose of animating the sky-line. But the color treatment of this front is admirable, and recalls the best work of the most successful colorist in architecture whom we have ever had in New York-Mr. Wrey Mould. It is characteristic that interesting treatment of color, like every other properly architectural development, has been stopped short by the new "movement."

REAR OF ROOF, HOUSE OF CORNELIUS VANDERBILT, FIFTH AVENUE.-GEORGE B. POST, ARCHITECT.

An unusually large variety of colors, and those of the most positive tints that natural stones supply, has here been employed and harmonized; and what is even rarer, they have all been used with architectural propriety to accentuate the construction and to heighten its effect. An ingenious and novel use of dark granite, which when polished is almost black, and which is employed in narrow bands precisely where it is wanted, deserves particular remark. The decorative carving attracts attention chiefly by its profusion, and by the exquisite crispness and delicacy of its execution. In both these respects the only parallel to it is in the house of Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, for, as we have seen, the carving upon the houses of Mr. W. H. Vanderbilt does not count. That this carving counts so fully is the result of the skill of the architect in fixing its

gle turret which, pretty and piquant as it is, did not grow out of the design, and to which the design has not been adjusted without a visible effort. The decorative detail is scarcely so well adjusted to the building in scale as that in the house just mentioned, or in the house designed for Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt by Mr. Post, being partly lost by its minuteness, but it has the same merit of being in the right place, and designed for its place, and is cut with the same perfection. Besides the strictly architectural decoration, the sculptural decoration, which in the work of Mr. Vaux is confined to medallions that are not medallions, but detached heads emerging from the wall, is in this work carried much further and done much better than in any other decorative sculpture that can be seen out-of-doors in New York, unless the figures on the pedestal of Mr. St. Gaudens's statue of Farragut be excepted; and the delicacy of the execution in such work as, for example, the procession of cherubic musicians on the corbel of the oriel is less admirable than the grace and movement of the design, and the exquisite modelling of the surfaces in very low relief. In a more recent work of Mr. Hunt's, the Guernsey building, in lower Broadway, a street front in distinctly modern Gothic, there is assuredly no error in scale on the side of minuteness, but the treatment, in mass and in detail, is marked by great vigor and animation, and the architecture of the building is an emphatic expression of its structure.

place and adjusting its scale so that it everywhere assists the architecture, and is better in its place than it would be in another place.

These things are equally true of the equally profuse carving in the house designed by Mr. Hunt for Mr. W. K. Vanderbilt, but this, although in a monochrome of gray limestone, would have a high architectural interest without the least decoration by force of design alone, and in spite of its great richness of detail the impression made by the disposition and the modelling of its masses is the chief factor in its effectiveness. The only serious drawback to the complete success of the composition has been wrought by the architect's desire to introduce an an

Another commercial building, at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street, is by the architects of the Union League Club, and seems to have been designed under the pressure of a recent discovery that that building would not do. There is no doubt about the discovery; it is only a pity that it should not have been made from the drawings before they were irrev