New Books on Art

I.

THE immediate points of contact between Raphael and Michel Angelo are not so important that their biographies needed to be written together; else it would have been done before. They met at Rome in 1508; they carried on their great decorative works in the Vatican side by side, and the younger man shows in his later productions the influence of the grand manner of the elder. But they seem to have had hardly a speaking acquaintance; there was a large disparity in their ages, and Raphael was taken out of the strange, fruitful turmoil of the time in which they flourished forty-two years earlier than Michel Angelo, though he had entered it so much later, He died, as we know, at thirty-seven, while the other lived on to eighty-eight. Mr. Perkins¹ finds, however, in his plan of treating of the two as at present, for the first time, so far as he knows, conjointly, a warrant for adding something more to the vast bibliography which, in the case of Michel Angelo, was found, on the four hundredth anniversary of his birth, three years ago, to reach to one hundred and fifty good-sized pages of titles of works alone, and with Raphael must be as much. He believes the distinctive peculiarities of each can be better set forth than usual by force of contrast. This, together with their contemporaneous appearance, their connection with the same eminent third parties, the great art patrons of the age, and the relation of their extraordinary prominence in art, which has not been diminished by anything that has succeeded them, is quite warrant enough, if any other were needed than the attractiveness of the manner in which he has accomplished it, for his enterprise. There is not, after all, so very much of this vast bibliography accessible to the private individual when he comes to look it up; and if there were, the modern manner must be accepted in this field, as in others, as an excuse for a good deal of reprinting. We think the same information and critical estimates contained in Mr. Perkins’s book will not be found elsewhere so satisfactorily and lucidly presented. This is in part owing to the full illustrations so necessary in work of this kind, in which many of its predecessors— valuable otherwise, like the biographies of Grimm and Wolzogen — are lacking. The increasing facilities for illustration, as by the heliotype process used in the present case, allowing its advantages to be given to books of moderate cost, will probably make it more and more a feature of the modern manner. There are numerous full plates after the best engravings and autograph drawings of tlie masters, besides a quantity of minor sketches, tail - pieces, and tasteful initial letters. Heliotypes are not line engravings, it is true; the fastidious can complain of an impairment of the ultimate perfections in them, sometimes a slight thickening and blurring of lines, the incongruous feeling of the smooth paper, and the absence, of relief to the touch; but what is lost is infinitesimal compared to what is gained. In the ease of the reproductions of drawings, as that of the Lost Soul from the Last Judgment, at page 234, the loss is not appreciable. These plates accentuate the descriptions to those who have seen the originals in a way that mere feats of memory could not. To those who have not they give a definite conception which the greatest expenditure of word-painting might labor in vain to accomplish. The previous volumes of Mr. Perkins, The Tuscan Sculptors and The Italian Sculptors, issued in London, with their elaborate etchings, which prove him artist as well as writer, are a sufficient reference for his inclination and trained judgment in the matters in hand. He repeats something of what he there had to say of Michel Angelo, who came prominently into the scope of the inquiry in the most important of his many departments; but it is of course much amplified, and brought into a matured and symmetrical form.

The plan carries along the two subjects of the essay in turn, so as to keep them abreast chronologically, and refers each to the foil of the other, as the successive occasions offer. It recalls a little those formal compositions, the parallels, as between Dryden and Pope; or Jay and Hamilton, with which our ancestors pleased themselves. On the one hand Dryden, on the other Pope: Dryden more capricious and free, Pope more Studied and cautious; Dryden content to satisfy, Pope desirous to excel. But there is nothing formal in the easy, pleasing manner of Mr. Perkins, and his method of proceeding by close contrast, we are ready to admit, has the advantages claimed for it. As we progress in knowledge of each we comprehend better the other. Each in turn illuminates and is illuminated, and the appearances have the definiteness coming from illumination by a single direct light. The parallel here is not a case for fine-drawn discriminations. It is a plain, straightforward setting forth of, for the most part, boldly opposed qualities. These two lives can hardly appear to any differently than to Grimm, who found them “ like a short and sunny spring contrasted with a long year beginning in tempest and in tempest ending.” The volume is fuller in its critical than in its strictly biographical portion, but it does not differ in this from some of the professed biographies. There is, in fact, no very large accumulation of strictly personal details. They had few interests apart from their works. There is a glimpse in two or three mediocre sonnets of Raphael’s of some love affair, said to have been with a baker’s daughter, the Fornarina, but the author is disposed to put her down as one of the mythical personages of history. Michel Angelo was engaged as an engineer in the defense of Florence against the imperial troops, and cherished in his later years a Platonic passion for a noble lady, Vittoria Colonna, and a warm friendship for a young amateur artist, Cavalieri. Apart from these, all is pictures and statues and architecture, and the negotiations for them. Raphael appears the more engrossed of the two, yet an idea of the completeness with which Michel Angelo was wrapped up in his occupation, so that he could never conceive of his being engaged in any other way, is gathered from his letter to Francis I.: “ If I live long enough I will prepare a statue in marble and one in bronze, and also a picture, for your majesty, as I have long desired to do. If I should die first, and we are permitted to sculpture and paint in the other world, where we shall no longer grow old, then I will perform my promise. ”

The difference between them was not especially one of circumstances, —both had the fullest opportunities placed at their disposal for the display of all there was in them, — but a radical one of temperament. which extended to all their works. One adapted himself gayly to his conditions, like a dry boat to a tossing sea; the other opposed himself rigidly to them, and bore ill the grievance of their concussion. The history of Michel Angelo is a record of quarrels, ill-regulated receipts and disbursements, the adjustment of which defrauds him of just compensation for his own services, and sometimes subjects him to suspicions of dishonesty, met by indignant calls for investigation. He was sent on distasteful missions to quarry marble, set at occupations he did not like and debarred from those he did. His pride was met by the superior haughtiness of potentates. He fumed, desponded, and cast forth his great works in a sort of paroxysm. Raphael walked like a prince at the head of troops of scholars, wealthy, courted, and unruffled. He expended upon each successive demand only the just measure of energy it required. He completed, touch by touch, the perfection serenely contemplated and proposed in advance. Turning over these alternate chapters, one is impressed somewhat as in watching a succession of heavy shadows flying across a smiling landscape. The more erratic genius who scattered his powers, the type of all those who have aspired after the unknown and impossible, is perhaps nearer to our sympathies; but the balanced life of Raphael, the exquisite fineness of his quality, his conception of an attainable ideal in the common humanity about him, and his calm progress towards the complete realization of it claim the admiration belonging to so rare an instance of harmonious power. It is not a cold perfection, but full of vitality. His study is extremely close. In the department of Madonnas and Holy Families he painted more in number than the years of his life, yet no two are alike. They are infinitely delicate variations upon a single theme. He drew out of it all that it was capable of. “ The Virgin and Child, with Saint John and the attendant saints,” says Perkins, “ are to him what the notes in the musical scale are to a musician. ... In the Seggiola and the Tenda the divine infant nestles in his mother’s arms like a bird in its nest; in the Cardellino and the Belle Jardiniere he plays like a child with the infant John; in the Peace he listens graciously to prayer; in the Palma he accepts the flowers gathered for him by Saint Joseph; in the Vela he sleeps under the watchful eyes of his mother; in the San Sisto he is awake, and, as it were, transfigured by a divine spirit which irradiates his brow, beams from his eyes, and, like a light set in a vase of alabaster, shines through his human form. It is by comparing these pictures, identical in subject, but differing so widely in individuality and character of charm, that we get the best idea of the richness of Raphael’s fancy.”

It is a very human career, too. Its components, in the successive influences brought to bear upon him, can be accurately traced. It is not a digression to examine that contemplative Umbrian school, descending from traditions of the early frescoes at Assisi, which was the first of these influences; nor the character of his mountainous home, abounding in those landscapes of which he made such use in his pictures; nor the court of good dukes of Urbino, where “the Perfect Courtier” of Castiglione was possible in a time of assassinations and all shameful crimes elsewhere. Nothing is sweeter and quainter, or conceivable, as a fitter preparation for what was to follow than the manner of his youth there, serving, as it is believed, as a model for the child Jesus and an ingenuous blonde angel in the passable altar-pieces of his father, Giovanni Santi, —with his mother turned to account by the thrifty painter as the nearest and most economical model for a madonna. Under Perugino, he was Perugino and something more. At Florence he learned from Lionardo and Fra Bartolommeo a more natural composition, and the secret of a depth and thoughtfulness lacking in the constrained and superficial sweetness of his Peruginesque manner. At Rome critics find in his four beautiful allegorical figures in the Stanze, Religion, Poetry, Philosophy, and Jurisprudence, the influence of Michel Angelo’s Sibyls in the Sistine Chapel, and in his Evangelists a reflection of the mighty prophets of the same. He was influenced at Rome above all by the antique. In his adaptation of it, it is one of his notable features that he is the type of the highest modern notion of reconciling the two conflicting ideals, of the flesh and the spirit, which came so sharply in contact at the Renaissance period. He joined the mediæval soul to the classic body. His forms are beautiful and rejoice in their strength, but the faculties are coordinated. The baser are subdued, and honor is paid to the higher. It results from his talent for assimilation that at the end his work was a sum of all the perfections of the time, with his own genius added, and yet there is no charge of plagiarism. He had the fine sense to seize essences. He took the whole vitalizing principles, but nothing so coarsely tangible that it could be. said he copied. “ This,” we say, contemplating such an unwavering progress and its results, “ is life as it should be.” It were weak to ask that it should be free from severe and unremitting toil, but should not effort at last be crowned with success, and not baffled of its aim?

Unlike Raphael, his brooding, introspective, unhappy contemporary, we are given to understand, resisted all influences. Whatever he had he drew from within himself, and he had but a single manner. It was nearly as strong at first as at last. Apprenticed to Ghirlandaio at thirteen, he took nothing even from this first master, who finished so closely, and introduced, like Holbein, realistic every-day burghers kneeling in his stiff religious tableaux. With some small debt to the antique, he shut his eyes to everything else, and disdained to correct even his faults from observation of others. The naked human figure for the form, and some far-away secret store-house of sublimities for the soul, were his only material. This scornful trait does not impress one as egotism in the ordinary sense. It is more like a supreme disgust at the disparity between the realization and the dim conceptions of the imagination for which he strove, which included merits and faults in a like indifference. He left scores of statues in which the form just begins to emerge from the block, full of a vague impressiveness. Their meaning was perhaps as much a mystery to him as to others. He repeatedly declared himself, in a passion of impatience, neither sculptor, painter, nor architect, yet his pride was not the less intense. He was comparing himself, not with things as they are, but with some standard of towering perfection seen only by himself.

As to his architecture, M. Garnier, who wrote professionally the section on this head of the elegant volume prepared by the Gazette des Beaux Arts (and he is followed by Mr. Perkins), agrees with his own dissatisfied estimate. “ Though he has the stroke, the force, the breadth, the will, the personality, which make the great composer,” he says, “Michel Angelo is ignorant of the language of architecture, does not know its grammar, and can hardly write. Having conceived the leading lines of the design, it would seem as if he had written upon his drawing, ‘ Here place a cornice, there a capital.’” The line of criticism seems a little hypercritical, it is not unusual for good architects even at the present day to confide some of the details to subordinates, and we find it hard to believe that so masterly a composer of masses could not have done as well with whatever capitals and cornices, in his great press of affairs, he chose to honor with his attention. Lübke, in his late History of Art, continues the old view, and finds one of his cornices at least, that of the Farnese palace, “ grandly effective,” and his plan for the Capitol “ of matchless artistic grace.”

The really comprehensive work on pottery has not yet been written. Perhaps the accumulation of material is so great that it would not be reasonable to expect it in any moderate compass. Of the mass of publications on the subject each has its peculiar one - sidedness. This speculates upon ethnological questions, and is broadly philosophic to the neglect of detail. That contains quaint and curious information which is of genuine interest, but cannot be turned to account by the practical collector. The next is a cold catalogue of marks and formulas. In all the equilibrium is disturbed on the side of nationality. The author naturally devotes a preponderating share of attention to the country in which and in whose language his work appears. There are English, French, German, and Italian histories of the ceramic art. It seems to be thought time, brief as has been our career in the fascinating pursuit, for American histories. This means simply that the existing material must be worked over and something incorporated to give it a local flavor.

This object is accomplished both in Mr. Elliott’s book ² and in Mr. Prime’s,³ which appear side by side, by taking the pictorial illustrations in part from ceramic specimens in our few museums and among our home collections. As Jacquemart calls attention to this and that beautiful piece in the collection of Rothschild and others, the writer finds plates and vases to exemplify their meaning at Mr. S. P. Avery’s and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is further appended to each a brief chapter — very similar in both, and in Mr. Elliott’s made up largely of quotations from former writing of Mr. Prime’s — on the history of American ceramics. If there is indeed only as much to be said on the subject as here appears, we do not find so good a reason for the existence of the books as we supposed there might be. Our own idea of the American work on pottery that would have been justified would be a moderate-sized volume going much more fully into the American production, its past, its present, and its prospects; a sketch of our earths and other facilities for the manufacture; and such a detailed account of our collectors and acquisitions that it could be understood what the ruling tendencies are, and to what point we have already attained. A good deal more on modern and contemporary pottery abroad than we have been favored with would also not be out of place. Such a volume would be a useful supplement to the general standard treatises, and an addition to the subject, not only for this market, but for others, as the present compilations from former works certainly are not.

It would have been better for Mr. Elliott’s book if it had not had Mr. Prime’s as a rival. It is impossible to speak of them without drawing comparisons. The latter is much the more methodical and workmanlike in its structure. Mr. Elliott, on the other hand, has the advantage in his illustrations. They are very full and elegant, and this is so important a means of conveying information in this particular branch as to be entitled to considerable weight as an offset. The representations of the Havilands’ Limoges faience, at pages 150 and 151, are especially pleasing, and true to the peculiarly bold and artistic effect of this ware. That of Solon’s vase, in pâle sur püte, on page 316, is nearly as good.

Both of these wares can now be had in considerable supply of our dealers, the latter example being taken from Tiffany’s stock in New York. The Limoges especially is earning a deserved popularity. The author commends it as “equal to the best work of China and Japan. Nothing is niggled or petty. . . . These painters are artists in color. Bold and strange as the work is, nothing is glaring, showy, bright, or flashy; throughout there is that reserve which indicates strength and creates confidence.”

The reader will be impressed with a sense of Mr. Elliott’s enthusiasm for his pursuit, his understanding of what is really meritorious in good work, and his earnest conviction about certain artistic matters, —as that enlightened conventionalism, and not imitation, is what is desirable in ceramic ornament; and sociological matters, — as that the “ busy men who are making railways and coalpits, under the pleasing illusion that they are developing the country more than the rest of us,” are wrong; the home is the central fact, and the art of living the first and worthiest object of attention. But this, with much more interesting matter which will repay perusal, is rather jumbled.

Much of the author’s illustration of the subject from the exhibits at the Centennial is as loose as the private letter of a casual visitor. For instance: “The Owari porcelain is mostly the blue. . . . But so far as one visit could reveal, [our italics] there was nothing equal to the old six-mark blue.” Again: “ The case of old wares shown by Kiriu Kosho Kuwaisha, from Tokio, contained a collection which had a kind of mysterious fascination even to us outside barbarians, which we suppose might have become an intense desire to possess could we have known anything about them.”

Surely, there was no necessity for the author’s thus, as the very vulgar say, “ giving himself away.” Would it not have been better to say nothing? The good points of the book are its feeling, considerable information which, however inaptly arranged, is entertaining, and, as has been said, the pictures.

Mr. Gardner⁴ appears as an interpreter of the great decorative truths of the moment to an humbler class than that to which they were at first promulgated. It is evident, both from his mingling of very small economies with his æsthetic and moral reflections and from his bold air of original discovery, that he relies upon an audience prevented by the pinchings of severe poverty from having read in Eastlake, Clarence Cook, the Misses Garrett, the popular magazines, or even the original Downing, in a complete form the fragmentary knowledge he treats them to. There is a young lady who foregoes a proposed spring bonnet in order to paper her room, in accordance with correct principles, at a total of three dollars and eighty cents; and a man who has constructed two chairs and a foot-stool out of an empty soapbox. The man’s name is John. We know that he employs his leisure time in researches after perpetual motion, and do not wonder that he is not wealthy. His house is an example of what may be accomplished in art with a lofty ideal, a fret-saw, and some knowledge of bricklaying. He has a fire-place which he built in person by the following method: he “ bought an old grate and a plate of cast-iron at a junk shop, stole some bricks and mortar, laid up a couple of thin walls as far apart as the length of the grate, supported the grate near the bottom, and put the plate on the top, — all inside of the antique original [fireplace],” and finally a wooden shelf over the whole. Elsewhere, John has a room with two mirrors in the corners instead of one in the middle; and another with a red frieze, on which are pasted a collection of figures in black, representing the animals of Noah’s Ark. Though they are supposed to be poor, the author sets strangely little value on the time of his readers. To avoid paying the workmen who could do the things he proposes expeditiously, he advises an amount of personal tinkering in an old coat and overalls that would not consist with success in any occupation. The more so as the experiments are mainly of a character which could not fail to come to grief and call at last for the employment of a regular practitioner, besides the wear and tear of temper. He makes a visit to a person designated " the prophet ” for his great success in matters of the kind in question. He finds him painting his hall with a paneling of blue storks on a black ground. He has already painted the dining-room with squirrels on a red ground, and ornamented the billiard-room with a Chinese paper, a dado with a simple pattern of large cheeks, and “ a serene frieze.” The author would like to take all the world with him to this home, which he finds more a temple than a home.

Their triteness is not so much an objection to Mr. Gardner’s suggestions as their incompleteness. They are not numerous enough to form a system. Most of his propositions are without value to the person who cannot attempt structural changes and must be content with what can be done to the movable property of his interior. On the other hand, they are too few to suffice the one who owns his house and proposes to tear it quite to pieces. There is a sentiment in favor of platform staircases, windowseats, and an outside hood over windows, but nothing about roofs, dormers, chimney-pots, or a porch; nothing, as we have said, to constitute a system either to build or furnish by. Here is rather a collection of casual recipes, and may well enough have been got together, as they purport to have been, in the experience of nine successive days of an architect’s practice. But nine successive days of an architect’s life — one of the most useful and thoroughly to be respected as it is — are not necessarily matter for a book, however it may be with nine typical and selected days. The first case is that of “ Mollie,” whose room is to be repapered. This affords an opening to lay down the valuable ordinance of the dado and frieze, and also to dwell upon the principle that rooms which expect to have pictures hung up in them should not have pictures of hunting scenes and so forth taking part in the pattern of the wall-paper, as the two kinds conflict. The next is that of “St. Augustine.” He thinks of having a hard-wood floor instead of a carpet. He is encouraged in the project, and the argument for rugs rehearsed. “ Harry Jr.” writes to complain that if he has wide windows in his house, as he wishes, there will be no place for the outside blinds. He is clearly told, as the fact is, that outside blinds have no rights entitled to respect. They should be dispensed with, and replaced with curtains of jute at thirty cents a yard. “Warwick” objects to the ordinary rectangular appearance of doors. He is given some designs with eccentric braces in them, which would by no means come within the scope of moderate purses to build. We are surprised at the “ Colonel,” on the sixth day. A simple private citizen, he comes forward with a more radical aesthetic idea than the architect himself, to wit: that door and window frames ought to be very like picture frames, and that there is no more reason for doors being all of the same height, style of casing, and curvature at the top than for hanging up a number of copies of Bierstadt’s Yo Semite. He is gently put down in this by the architect, but in compensation advised that he may and ought to run the window-casings up to the ceiling and down to the base-board, as a more constructive feature. The really startling passage, the crisis of acute interest, is where a bold rebellion is announced against the exclusive domination of hard woods. The fearless statement is hazarded that wood may he painted if a general harmony of things seems to require it. In short, every successive difficulty is met. The author comes up smiling to the next, with a geniality, a benevolent largeness, and an air of conveying information without pretense that would be charming except for the trifling lack of the information itself. Mr. Gardner, in fact, instead of appearing as a teacher, is in great need of learning. His illustrations of the effects he would have us try to produce by cheap tricks of copying shadows of grains and grasses on our panels and screens — instead of spending a year with a drawing-master — are an incontrovertible method of showing it. Another series of home-made illustrations interwoven with the rest gives playful suggestions — as of a party going to Worcester on a pilgrimage to “ the prophet ” — that come into the author’s brain as he writes. They should be a warning to anybody having this seductive taste not to injure his printed matter, bad as it may be, with such an auxiliary. The figures are about five heads high. The women have no feet, and appear to be held to the ground by some crushing pressure; the men consist of a toddling coat and pantaloons. The chapter on stairs is diversified by the incident of a woman falling headlong down a staircase which is a simple, flat, front elevation. It is a problem in foreshortening to amaze Michel Angelo.

Mr. Arthur Little’s sketches ⁵ are interesting as far as they go, but so incomplete as a whole that one wonders why the taste that chose such a subject should have been unable to handle it more attractively. It may be sufficiently accounted for by his mistake in going to work as architect instead of, or much more than, as artist. With an apparent idea of directly benefiting somebody, he has made a number of his views hardlly more than formal “ elevations,” and shown newel posts to a scale large enough to be easily adopted into working drawings. He appears really to take hold with sincerity of the idea, a little coquetted with of late, that our “colonial style” ought to be revived for modern uses. Had he recalled these old New England houses merely for the quaintness in which they abound, and their historic associations, we should have been better pleased. With only so much of a purpose he would have been less scrupulous about a particular molding, and he would by no means have confined himself to interiors. But he would have given us more diversified representations, more picturesquoness, more of their real spirit, which is the important thing. There ought to be in the ideal work of this kind not only large plates each monotonously finished up to an encompassing heavy black line, but some playfulness, graceful vignetting, irregular “ bits ” now and then, glimpses of a vine-clad porch, or a dormer window peeping through the foliage, a figure musing by the fire-place or mounting one of the old stair-ways. Letterpress, too, is an essential part. A meagre line on the opposite page, explaining that this is the chimney-piece of the Cabot house or the Pickman house, is not enough. Who outside of Salem knows anything about the Cabot house? The work of Mrs. Greatorex on old New York is not a bad model for this kind of enterprise. There ought to be in the ancient residences of New England fully as much of possibilities in heroic and sentimental reminiscence and gossip about manners and customs long gone by.

As to reviving the colonial architecture, it is not worth while to mince matters in saying that we have nothing to learn of that period in the way of ornament, and it is to this that Mr. Little principally devotes himself. The characteristic of colonial ornament is a spindling thinness of moldings, and a brokenspirited droop in the scrolls and natural festoons of which it availed itself in its carvings, that calls to mind the weeping willow by a funereal urn of the worsted “samplers, " another notable decoration of the time. To go back to this product of the hands of ordinary builders, of a date when there were no facilities for art, and even an avowed hostility to it, from the vigorous work in several styles that we have since known would be sickly sentimentality indeed. As well revive the lackadaisical “annuals,” and put the monument maker’s figures in the front rank of sculpture. The colonists very sensibly covered up their carved decorations with plenty of good white paint. The Ladd house at Portsmouth, we learn, has a garland in pear-wood over its chimney-piece, by Grinling Gibbons. When the colonial taste had yielded a little to that for the honest exhibition of the natural grain and color of woods to which we have later become accustomed, it was scraped with care, but “ the wood was found to be so much stained as to make it necessary to paint it again.”

Something can be learned from the spirit of these old residences, if not from their details. There is an art worth seeking in their feeling of homeliness, something emanating from their spread upon the ground, their gambrel roofs and dormers, their wainscots (painted as they are) and their low ceilings, and, let us add, their furniture. It is for this reason that it is reprehensible in Mr. Little, if he wished to instruct us, to have shown almost nothing of them as a whole. His views comprise but one exterior, that of the Wentworth house at Little Harbor, Newcastle. Of the others there is not even a hurried sketch, and of the Wentworth house there are no interiors given. It would have been interesting to follow the correspondence between its outward aspect and its internal arrangements. Nor is there a stick of furniture shown in any of the rooms, although we are informed of one house, the Waters house of Salem, that it “ probably contains the finest collection of colonial furniture in the country.”

The most pleasing illustrations are those of the various staircases, these having considerable perspective range and something of a pictorial character. The parlor of the Wentworth house of Portsmouth — not to be confounded with the one before mentioned — has quite a magnificent appearance, with its pilasters, deep cornice, and especially some old paper above the wainscot, of an enormously large flowered pattern, which has the effect of tapestry in the drawing. The most notable points of these interiors as here presented are corner cupboards with a scallop-shell finish for their ceilings, and the location of the chimney — contrary to present usage, which retains it with its store of heat as much within the house as possible — in the outside wall. This gives it great projection, and makes prevalent the arrangement of a window on each side, spanned by flat arches and provided with cozy seats. Sometimes, as in the Devereux house, one of those is a false window with looking-glass instead of lights, which reflects the room. There are plenty of dentils, and the egg and dart molding in the cornices. Frequently a patriotic spread eagle and stars take their place among the ornamental reliefs.

It is not to disparage colonial architecture to point out that more enlightened later styles have all of its peculiar merits, with others. We recognize the quaint charm of its age and dissimilarity to prevailing patterns. There may even be structural points and methods of treatment worthy of attention. But nobody can seriously contemplate it as a system to be renewed. Mr. Little’s aim is too technical for the general public, and he illustrates a style that few architects will be apt to appreciate as such. The work of adequately exploiting old New England houses is still to be done. It is of a kind well worth doing, and we shall hope for further attempts.