Notes and Reviews 
but after all, the South and the West, whose 
travel flows through Washington, must grow 
apace and for long before those accommoda¬ 
tions will be used to the full more than once 
in four years. In the meantime other cities, 
and among them those having a greater per¬ 
manent population than Washington, are to 
learn from that city the advantages of plac¬ 
ing their depots at the proper point with 
regard to radiating streets, to surround them 
with spacious approaches, to make them 
within commodious, complete and easy of 
operation—in a word, to ennoble the railway 
terminal, which is in fact the modern gateway 
to the city. 
The book by Harry W. Desmond and 
Herbert Croly, which has been published 
by the Appletons under the title of “Stately 
H omes in America,” 1 contains very many 
full-page half-tones selected from the recent 
numbers of our contemporary 'The Architec¬ 
tural Record. The number of these illus¬ 
trations would seem to be about a hundred 
and fifty ; and there are perhaps thirty im¬ 
portant houses which are illustrated more or 
less perfectly by them—some receiving five 
illustrations each, one having even seven in¬ 
terior views devoted to it—others coming 
off' with two or even one. Thus the new 
Carnegie house is given only as to its exte¬ 
rior, and that from the southwest only ; but 
this may be accounted for by the very recent 
construction of that building, which may be 
supposed to lack something as yet of its 
completeness within. On the other hand 
Mr. Poor’s house, also in New York, has 
no architectural exterior at all, either in 
these pages or in its own proper individuality, 
being only a congeries of plain old brown- 
stone houses remade within ; and this house 
shows even in its interior rather an accumula¬ 
tion of furniture than a matured architectural 
composition. The reader will readily see 
that there is here a gathering of architectural 
designs of many sorts. 
The text, which occupies 532 pages of 
open and very handsome printing, is divided 
into eight chapters with titles explaining their 
1 “Stately Homes in America, from Colonial Times to the Present 
Day,” by Harry W. Desmond and Herbert Croly. 532 pp., small 
quarto, profusely illustrated. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1903. 
Price, $7.50, net. 
contents. 'They deal with the Colonial Res¬ 
idence, the Transitional Dwelling, the Mod¬ 
ern Residence, and also and in the first place 
an article about the “Men Who Build Fine 
Houses.” It is evident that this essay, last 
named but first in order, would have to do 
with the generic character of the American 
millionaire as such. And this is a very well 
conducted piece of social observation. It is 
a curious question to ask one’s self, whether 
the judgment of people a hundred years 
hence upon this subject will agree somewhat 
closely with the opinions of today, as ex¬ 
pressed here ; whether the notables as history 
records them will be those the most in the 
public eye today; but it is evident that 
most of our readers and the greater number 
of persons belonging to the class from which 
our readers are drawn will agree with this 
summing up in its general tendency, if not 
in all of its details. 
Our own attention is called very forcibly 
to the chapters concerning the “Transitional 
Dwelling.” Everyone who looks back to the 
years between 1840 and 1870 will recall, or 
will have observed, the extraordinary dull¬ 
ness, triviality and absence of intelligence in 
the dwelling houses of that epoch. In city 
and country alike, they are nothing, archi¬ 
tecturally speaking. Now it has been found 
always very difficult to put into words the 
exact nature of that vague and vapid method 
of design. For this reason we are the more 
pleased to find in these two chapters a very 
nearly successful attempt to express the in¬ 
expressible—for what must be so difficult to 
explain as the absence of all character? It 
has not been found practicable to illustrate 
these two chapters, for the pictures scattered 
through them from pages 97 to 210 have 
nothing to do with the text. It has been 
found that pictures of those houses were 
insufferable: and there is one exception 
only to the statement that no illustration 
was available. The three views of the in¬ 
terior of the Stewart house really do illus¬ 
trate the subject of the American transitional 
epoch; for, although this Stewart house is 
mentioned in chapter V, it is not there that 
it really belongs. It is a building of the 
very bad period of the civil war; and it has 
no ri»;ht to a place among “ modern ” houses 
except through its mere bigness and cost. 
308 
