even throughout the endless vistas of a
great American street, would be simply maddening. Better the most
heaven-storming or sky-scraping audacity of individualism than any
attempt to transform New York into a Fourierist phalanstery or a model
prison. I do not doubt that there will one day be some legal restriction
on Towers of Babel, and that the hygienic disadvantages of the
microbe-breeding "well" or air-shaft will be more fully recognised than
they are at present. A time may come, too, when the ideal of an unforced
harmony in architectural groupings may replace the now dominant instinct
of aggressive diversity. But whatever developments the future may have
in store, I must own my gratitude to the "fierce individualism" of the
present for a new realisation of the possibilities of architectural
beauty in modern life. At almost every turn in New York, one comes
across some building that gives one a little shock of pleasure.
Sometimes, indeed, it is the pleasure of recognising an old friend in a
new place--a patch of Venice or a chunk of Florence transported bodily
to the New World. The exquisite tower of the Madison Square Garden, for
instance, is modelled on that of the Giralda, at Seville; while the new
University Club, on Fifth Avenue, is simply a Florentine fortress-palace
of somewhat disproportionate height. But along with a good deal of sheer
reproduction of European models, one finds a great deal of ingenious
and inventive adaptation, to say nothing of a very delicate taste in the
treatment of detail. New York abounds, it is true, with monuments of
more than one bygone and detestable period of architectural fashion; but
they are as distinctly survivals from a dead past as is the wooden
shanty which occupies one of the best sites on Fifth Avenue, in the very
shadow of the new Delmonico's. I wish tasteless, conventional, and
machine-made architecture were as much of a "back-number" in England as
it is here. A practised observer could confidently date any prominent
building in New York, to within a year or two, by its architectural
merit; and the greater the merit the later the year.

In short, architecture is here a living art. Go where you will in these
up-town regions, you can see imagination and cultured intelligence in
the act, as it were, of impressing beauty of proportion and detail upon
brick and terra-cotta, granite and marble. And domestic or middle-class
architecture is not neglected. The American "maste