have never come near enough to human life, in its individual characteristics, to be plastic for the expression of those emotions to which we desire to give the immortality of stone in memory of departed friends.  The Romantique, however, confined to no rigid types of external form, out of its noble freedom is capable of giving “a local habitation and a name” to a thousand affections which hitherto have wandered unseen from heart to heart, or been palpable only in words and gestures which disturb our sympathies for a while and then die.  Probably the most remarkable indication of this capacity, as yet shown, is contained in a tomb erected by Constant Dufeux in the Cimetiere du Sud, near Paris, for the late Admiral Dumont d’Urville.  This structure contains in its outlines a symbolic expression of human life, death, and immortality, and in its details an architectural version of the character and public services of the distinguished deceased.  The finest and most eloquent resources of color and the chisel are brought to bear on the work; and the whole, combined by a very sensitive and delicate feeling for proportion, thus embodies one of the most expressive elegies ever written.  The tomb of Madame Delaroche, nee Vernet, in the Cimetiere Montmartre, by Duban, is another remarkable instance of this elastic capacity of Greek lines; and though taken frankly, in its general form, from a common Gothic type, its chaste and graceful freedom from Gothic restrictions in detail gives it a life and poetic expressiveness which must be exceedingly grateful to the Love which commanded its erection.

Paris thus affords us, in its modern architecture, a happy proof of the inevitable reforming and refining tendencies of the abstract lines of Greece, when properly understood and fairly applied.  Under their influence old things have been made new, and the coldness and hardness of Academic Art have been warmed and softened into life.  Through the agency of the Romantique school, perhaps more new and directly symbolic architectural expressions have been uttered within the last four years than within the last four centuries combined.  Like the gestures of pantomime, which constitute an instinctive and universal language, these abstract lines, coming out of our humanity and rendered elegant by the idealization of study, are restoring to architecture its highest capacity of conveying thought in a monumental manner.  One of the most dangerous results of that eclecticism which the advanced state of our archaeological knowledge has made the principal characteristic of modern design consists in the fatal facility thus afforded us of availing ourselves of vast resources of forms and combinations ready-made to suit almost all the exigencies of composition, as we have understood it.  The public has thus been made so familiar with the set variations of classic orders and Palladian windows and cornices, with all manner of Gothic chamfers and cuspidations and foliations, and the other conventional