tent 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 mediaeval 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."

Until recently, no attention has been paid, even in Europe, to
historical sequence and special motives in the arrangement of
galleries. As in the Pitti Gallery, pictures were generally hung so
as to conform to the symmetry of the rooms,--various styles, schools,
and epochs being intermixed. As the progress of ideas is of more
importance to note than the variations of styles or the degree of
technical merit, the chief attention in selection and position should
be given to lucidly exhibiting the varied phases of artistic thought
among the diverse races and widely separated eras and inspirations
which gave them being. The mechanism of art is, however, go
intimately interwoven with the idea, that by giving precedence to the
latter we most readily arrive at the best arrangement of the former.
Each cycle of civilization should have its special department,
Paganism and Christianity being kept apart, and not, as in the
Florentine Gallery, intermixed,--presenting a strange jumble of
classical statuary and modern paintings in anachronistic disorder, to
the loss of the finest properties of each to the eye,