cal architecture of mediæval Europe would have been not merely impossible, but a thousand times worse than that, — sinful. So when the time came for what Mr. Ruskin considers the principal part of architecture, i.e., ornamentation, its first display was upon domestic buildings.
      Many devout citizens gradually accumulated worldly wealth, by the manufacture of New England rum, by shrewd traffic in persons of African birth, and by other legitimate industries and commercial ventures. Such wealthy citizens would seriously incline to more expensive dwellings. It was not to be expected that the artistic instinct, which is not imitative, but rather creative and inventive, had been stimulated by the harsh and struggling experiences that were foreordained for the men and women who colonized America. We often wonder at the large quantity of ancestors and furniture that came over in the Mayflower. There was also an amazing amount of condensed piety, but if there was any artistic cult stowed away in the hold, it was either carried back to England or blown away by the gales from the northeast, long before the forest primeval was cleared, the soil subdued, and the red men exterminated. For a good many generations, our ancestors found enough for their hands to do without philosophizing on the essential elements of beauty. They were sufficiently concerned, though sometimes mistaken, about the Good and the True, but the Beautiful was not treated as a means of saving grace, either in their preaching or in their practice. If, along with their highly developed religious and business tendencies, they had possessed even a small fraction of the esthetic intuitions of the heathen Greeks, or of the superstitious monks of the 11th and 12th centuries, the architecture called "colonial," — though "Georgian" is a better name — would never have been born. That divine recognition of the eternal fitness which seems to have been the