mansions of the rich and the dwellings of the people, and in solidity of construction as well as fitness for their purpose they have a decided advantage. Were all the houses of Liverpool reduced to shapeless heaps, her six-miles line of docks and the ruins of her warehouses would still remain to tell of her commercial greatness. Something similar to this may be said of most of the large cities of Europe, and some of those in the United States; but what would be left of San Francisco were her streets to be swept by fire? Verily nothing, except the basement of her unfinished city hall, and a pile of bricks on the site of the Palace Hotel. There is not upon the face of the civilized earth-neither in Europe, Asia, nor America—a large city whose buildings are, as a whole, so utterly devoid of all architectural merit as are those of San Francisco.

That it is a city of wood would be no reproach were the wood properly treated; but the wooden houses lie, like a man with a false shirt-front-they try to hide their material. They imitate stone; their fronts are channeled into blocks and sanded over, and quoins, window-sills, cornices, and other details are copied from those of the brick and stone dwellings of other modern cities. There is no need for this. Wood has its own characteristics as a building material, and should be treated so as to bring them out in the best

manner.

Wood was extensively used in the middle ages, and beautiful examples of wooden buildings, both public and private, are extant in the old cities of Europe. We call their style Gothic, but how different is their Gothic to that of the stone-built cathedrals and castles contemporary with them. The Swiss have a picturesque class of wooden dwellings peculiarly their own, and well suited to their mountainous country. I do not say that we should copy ei

ther of them-far from it; yet I do say that a wooden building should not ape a stone one, but should show its material, and delight in it.

Another evil, common all over the world, but especially conspicuous in San Francisco, is the misuse of ornament. Instead of good ornament, introduced in prominent parts of the building, where its beauty will be seen and appreciated the moment the spectator approaches sufficiently near, we have a front loaded with endless repetitions of the same detail; the same scrawny scroll looking at us from a hundred window-heads; the same little panels stuck in every corner; strings of vegetables, all alike, hanging from every column; and wreaths and cornucopias, badly carved, dangling between every projection, as if to leave a bit of plain surface anywhere were to break an eleventh commandment.

Now, although the decoration of a building is a very important part of it, it is altogether subordinate, in its effect upon a spectator, to the general form of the whole and the proportion of the parts to each other. When we look upon any architectural composition, as for example a church, from a distance, the pleasure derived from its contemplation, and therefore our estimate of its excellence, depends entirely upon the form of the outline and the relative proportions of its larger parts or masses.

As we approach nearer, and look upon the building from a distance at which the eye can still grasp the entire group, the forms of the windows, doors, and recesses, and the proportions of the columns, arches, and cornices, become the elements in influencing the mind to praise or condemn the structure. At this distance the proper or improper application of the ornaments also becomes apparent; but it is not until we approach still nearer-until the eye perceives only a small portion of the build

ing at once-until, in fact, we examine it piece by piece as a microscopist examines the insect under his lens-that we are able to judge correctly of the quality of the ornaments bestowed upon it.

Take two buildings, one of which has a good outline with the various parts well proportioned and combined, openings of graceful form, judiciously spaced and grouped, and ornament placed where it is most effective yet in itself coarse and incapable of giving pleasure to the artistic eye when viewed in detail, while the other, without any variety in the outline, and with openings of ungraceful form monstrously spaced, is yet loaded with delicately wrought ornaments of exquisite beauty, and I have no hesitation in saying that the former building will be far more satisfactory than the latter. A piece of scroll- work or carving, or a group of figures, may be a beautiful object in itself, considered as sculpture, but its architectural effect depends more upon its position than upon its own beauty. Were the unrivaled sculptures of Phidias placed upon an ill-proportioned structure, even were that structure in the style of the sculptor's country, they would not suffice to redeem it from absolute ugliness, but rather by sheer force of contrast would render that ugliness more conspicuous.

The cause of the low ebb to which architecture has fallen in this city must be attributed principally to the want of taste among those who pay for buildings. Just as among a public ignorant of physiology it is possible for a ras

cal or an ignoramus to be more successful as a doctor than a man who has devoted a life-time to the study of the ills our flesh is heir to can reasonably hope to be, so among a public whose knowledge of architecture is limited by what they see around them it is possible for a mere house-butcher to set himself up as an architect and obtain an enormous practice. Such men erect buildings by the score, but their works are not architecture, and their success, like that of the humbug physician, is simply proof of the ignorance and credulity of the public.

So universal has this bad taste become, that even those architects who are thoroughly qualified to do better are forced to pander to it in order to make a living, and thus flimsy construction, sham materials, and meretricious ornaments are the rule among us. No true architecture can be produced without time and thought, and both of these are almost (not altogether) impossible under the horrid system of building practiced in this city, to say nothing of the fact that the low commissions to which architects are often reduced preclude them from giving any building of ordinary dimensions the attention it requires. Something big, something cheap, something stuck over with upholstery ornament-this is what too many housebuilders of San Francisco want, and this they want in a week from the date of the order. They get it, the daily papers praise their enterprise and taste, and so our shams increase and multiply.

T is so new a country," I explain

“IT

ed, "so parvenu, so sunburned; it has no history worth the name. Beauties of its own wild conchoidal sort it has, but they have no associations not pre-historic-none, later than the Kichen-Möddings. You look out there over that wild sea-with keen irony named Pacific-back and round from coast-edge to Sierra; nothing! - nothing there knit in by memory with any noble pulse or passion of any heroic soul."

"Speak for yourself, my friend," replied the Californian somewhat coldly, swinging himself from his horse and tying him to a post. I buckled my bridle above his and followed him down a sort of path, and in a moment we stood together in a little cove of pebbly beach.

It was about midnight. The learned doctor arranged his traveling serape and lay down on the pebbles; hardly taking time to look around, I followed his example. We leaned on our elbows and smoked in silence. I watched the doctor's face. The shadow of his hat darkened it from the moonlight; only now and then when a deeper inhalation than ordinary almost set his enormous cigar aflame did the glow reflect itself in his eyes and bring out the deeply cut western features. The thin steel-trap lips vibrated suddenly:

"The waves came dancing to our very feet,

And all before us lay the wide, wide world.'

That's Goethe in Iphigenia, isn't it? and that's our position now. It is Orestes that speaks, extolling the faroff and the past. Do you remember the answer of Pylades?"

"Ah! quotation is the word to-night, my Doctor; very well. This is from Shelley:

"Nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse."" He puffed a smile of smoke.

"I take the hint. When we are old as your England we shall show you our antiquities, and be proud enough of our history-studying yours, perhaps, from the position of Macaulay's Maori tourist. In the meantime, we have originated a new literature of the West, a new humor whose broad smile wrinkles the world's mouth from San Francisco to London, to Saint Petersburg.

"Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away;' we are laughing aristocracy and oldworldism away."

"Laughing this away," I said sadly, "and how much more with it? The world and worlds, and all they contain, have become but cork - balls, dancing in the jester's whistle so highly prized by the American of to-day — above all, by that American of Americans, the Californian. Children grow too humorous to regard the paternal will or wish; wives and husbands roar with inextinguishable laughter at jokes turning on a fractured commandment or a facile divorce court; your plundered man or city is punctured with a thousand journalistic jests, amid the roars of the spectators. The land is sick-hearted

republic, miry with the corruptions of

oriental and decrepit despotisms-yet its one literary feature is the grin of the buffoon, its distinguishing tone a horse-laugh, its sentiment an eternal sneer. Your literary Breitmans 'solfe de infinide ash von eternal shpree!' When I read the funny sentences, misspelt and ungrammatical, contorted, distorted like the face of a clown for effect-when I understand that this is the most profitable and fame-bringing writing on this continent-that there is nothing too sober or sacred for its ridicule-I am well inclined to believe with Valentin, the Alexandrian philosopher, that there are men born without souls. If Mark Twain, for example, is not a literary hylique (as the great Gnostic termed it), he comes as a writer as near it as I ever wish to see."

"My friend," the doctor said, speaking in slow whiffs, "you are, in the first place, a foreigner with the prejudices of a foreigner; then a young man with the dogmatism of youth; and then you are, in a small way, a writer with no taste for humor-the grapes are sour, and your teeth are upon edge. Hence these sorrows of Werther."

He puffed on, as if pausing for a reply; but none came. He twitched his

lips, lighting another cigar.

"My tragedian," he expostulated, "that look of ineffable disgust is uncalled for. It is vacation-time, and we travel to be happy, and speak out as we want to, praising ourselves, decrying everybody else; of such are the delights of life, my brother. Your lofty principles and your slangless diction do you honor, but they are too elegant for every-day existence. Fine feathers draggle so in the ordinary back-yard of life. You take your mental stimulants out in virtuous indignation; I mine in Rabelaisian laughter. It comes to one end. Neither of us will ever reform or convert the world. I laugh, you cry, over spilt milk; then you cry

again at me for laughing, and I laugh again at you for crying. And the milk —a practical cat with a talent for lapping will save more of it in a minute than your howling will in a year. If not the laugher, I had rather be the cat.

"For example, as we rode through that little out-of-the-way town to-day we saw two peasant - women fighting. You grew virtuously indignant at the levity with which I regarded the proceeding. If I were a characteristic western reporter I should describe the scene in my paper to-morrow in some such style as this:

"Two Celtic ladies appealed this morning on our plaza to the great ordeal of battle, in re the ownership of a skillet.

"""Serene child of Satanas," said a foreigner in the crowd to a nonchalant Yankee, "canst thou stand calmly by and see the form of woman marred and mutilated thus? Catch one combatant and I'll hold the other back."

"""Mister," the free-born cautiously and sententiously replied, "them what in quarrels interpose must often wipe a bloody nose. Go in an' get yourn busted if you like, though."

"At this moment Madam Malony secured the skillet; she waved it over her head; she smote the O'Rafferty upon a star-like eye, making a black blank one side her visual life.

"The smitten one resounding smote the curb. She dreamed she dwelt in marble halls.

"The tears rolled down the Briton's cheek as he helped her up. "O, surely not for this," he wailed, "was the clay of her molded by God, and tempered with the tears of angels to the perfectest shape of woman."

"The O'Rafferty steadied herself; she looked with a single eye upon the glory of the Malonys. She flung herself into her good Samaritan's arms, and, with a voice, that, like a bell