The difficulty of expressing in words this complication of architectural thought is very great. The English designers are in one sense the most original of all, for they follow less closely in the general arrangements of the mass, or of the street front, the example set by former ages. In Germany, such indifference to what the past has taught is more seldom seen, and when seen, it takes, most generally, an ugly form of unrestrained fancy, guided neither by tradition nor by strong over-ruling good taste. In France, good taste is rather the rule. As in literature, so in all departments of fine art, the fault of the French work is in the desire not to be rash in the way of innovation, and good taste is always ready to instruct its votaries to follow the path marked out by the men who have just passed by in the human procession and who had needs to supply quite like those of the present day.
It will be well to rehearse these conclusions in the immediate presence of special examples. Plate LX is an apartment house in that region of West London which is just northwest of Kensington Gardens. It is not a costly building in proportion to its size; it is not adorned by sculpture except for an unimportant piece above the large arches of the entrance front and slight adornment of the frontons; it is built of brick with stone moderately used for the purpose of color-contrast, and its architectural ordonnance is limited to the marshalling of a certain number of pilasters supporting the simulacra of entablatures and the reality of very obvious pediments—these, and a tower well enough shaped and placed at the angle. And the point that the student should make at once in looking upon such a building is that it is so decidedly removed from the world of obvious copying. Nothing is copied except a detail here and there. One has the pleasant conviction that not a square yard of space has been sacrificed nor a square foot of possible or desirable window space abandoned for the purpose of archæological verity or the repute of having built something beautiful in a recognized style. So in the case of the building shown in [Plate LXI,] that planned for the West Ham Institute and built about 1895 in that suburban village which lies just north of “Woolwich Reach” on the Thames. The design is as independent of
