Since 1893 Chicago ought never to be mentioned as Porkopolis without a simultaneous reference to the fact that it was also the creator of the White City, with its Court of Honour, perhaps the most flawless and fairy-like creation, on a large scale, of man’s invention.  We expected that America would produce the largest, most costly, and most gorgeous of all international exhibitions; but who expected that she would produce anything so inexpressibly poetic, chaste, and restrained, such an absolutely refined and soul-satisfying picture, as the Court of Honour, with its lagoon and gondolas, its white marble steps and balustrades, its varied yet harmonious buildings, its colonnaded vista of the great lake, its impressive fountain, its fairy-like outlining after dark by the gems of electricity, its spacious and well-modulated proportions which made the largest crowd in it but an unobtrusive detail, its air of spontaneity and inevitableness which suggested nature itself, rather than art?  No other scene of man’s creation seemed to me so perfect as this Court of Honour.  Venice, Naples, Rome, Florence, Edinburgh, Athens, Constantinople, each in its way is lovely indeed; but in each view of each of these there is some jarring feature, something that we have to ignore in order to thoroughly lose ourselves in the beauty of the scene.  The Court of Honour was practically blameless; the aesthetic sense of the beholder was as fully and unreservedly satisfied as in looking at a masterpiece of painting or sculpture, and at the same time was soothed and elevated by a sense of amplitude and grandeur such as no single work of art could produce.  The glamour of old association that illumines Athens or Venice was in a way compensated by our deep impression of the pathetic transitoriness of the dream of beauty before us, and by the revelation it afforded of the soul of a great nation.  For it will to all time remain impossibly ridiculous to speak of a country or a city as wholly given over to the worship of Mammon which almost involuntarily gave birth to this ethereal emanation of pure and uneconomic beauty.

Undoubtedly there are few things more dismal than the sunless canons which in Chicago are called streets; and the luckless being who is concerned there with retail trade is condemned to pass the greater part of his life in unrelieved ugliness.  Things, however, are rather better in the “office” quarter; and he who is ready to admit that exigency of site gives some excuse for “elevator architecture” will find a good deal to interest him in its practice at Chicago.  Indeed, no one can fail to wonder at the marvellous skill of architectural engineering which can run up a building of twenty stories, the walls of which are merely a veneer or curtain.  Few will cavil at the handsome and comfortable equipment of the best interiors; but, given the necessity of their existence, the wide-minded lover of art will find something to reward his attention even in their