ue
or a square. A corner, or the head of a street, are most responsible
situations. A tall marble front, placed in a modest row of freestone, is
hideous, and yet the unrelieved monotony of many such rows is quite as
bad. A dome, unless at the top of a street or on some open space, is
next to worthless. Who would ever notice Boston State House or the
Baltimore Cathedral, but for their elevated and central positions?

We often find among the old masters elegant architectural paintings,
street views, taken from the picturesque cities they lived in. We should
like to find some one bold enough to paint a street view of Broadway or
Washington street or Chestnut street.

It is a pity that our architects are unwilling to acknowledge the
importance of the _buttress_. Concerning this feature, it is not easy to
say whether beauty or utility is most apparent. It is the very
idealization of strength, and hence its inherent elegance. Suppose Notre
Dame or Milan Cathedral stripped of their double tiers of flying
buttresses. Would you not say that their glory was gone--their beauty
departed? And yet the old builders did not pile them up against their
naves for mere beauty's sake. By no means. But they knew the immense
weight of their vaulted roofs, and anticipated the outward thrust of the
walls. That was the problem, and most fairly was it met. They
counteracted the outward pressure from within by an inward pressure from
without, and there was the buttress. But what if they had said, We are
not going to spoil our fine churches by sticking props all around them,
and had resorted to concealed bedplates and invisible rods of iron,
would their structures have been better or nobler or more enduring?
Fortunately, they gave themselves no concern, as to how they would
look--for architecture was honest in those days--they simply built them,
allowing decoration to come in afterward in its proper order; and
thereupon the buttress became the distinguishing feature of Gothic art.

Perhaps this is the very reason why we so neglect it; but symptoms are
already appearing which lead us to hope that gothophobia is on the
decline, and not the least of them is the outcropping of something that
would be a buttress if it dared to, but hides its real intention under a
classic mask, and passes off as a pilaster or a panel border. But it has
a guilty look, and the sooner it puts off its borrowed garments the
better. Certainly the demand for it is immense. S