il the
broadest of the four. Moldings are very simple and confined to the edge
of the panels, with the splayed or beveled panels of earlier years
gradually being abandoned in favor of plain, flat surfaces.

[Illustration: PLATE LXXXIV.--Interior Detail of Main Entrance, Congress
Hall; President's Dais, Senate Chamber, Congress Hall.]

[Illustration: PLATE LXXXV.--Gallery, Senate Chamber, Congress Hall.]

Architrave casings were the rule, sometimes extending to the floor and
often standing on heavy, square plinth blocks the height of the
skirting beneath its molding. There are instances of both types at
Mount Pleasant and Whitby Hall. The thickness of the walls in houses of
brick and stone encouraged the custom of paneling the jambs and soffit
of doorway openings to correspond with the paneling of the doors, the
effect being rich and very pleasing. Generally the architrave casing was
miter-joined across the lintel, as at Upsala, but in many of the better
houses this horizontal part of the casing was given an overhang of an
inch or two to form the doorhead. How pleasing this simple device was,
especially when a rosette of stucco was applied to each jog of the
casing, is well exemplified by the doors on the first floor at Whitby
Hall. Very similar door trim without the rosette is to be seen at
Cliveden and in numerous other houses.

At Mount Pleasant, and in several of the more pretentious old Colonial
mansions of Philadelphia, this type of door trim was elaborated by a
surmounting frieze and heavy pediment above the architrave casing. The
first floor hall at Mount Pleasant presents the interesting combination
of a pulvinated Ionic pediment with a mutulary Doric cornice and frieze
about the ceiling. Here one notices the flat dado and doors with raised
and molded panels as contrasted with the paneled wainscot and
bolection-molded, flat-paneled doors of the second-story hall. In this
latter, also, some of the pediments are complete, others broken,
illustrating another whim of the early American builders. Here the
cornice is also Ionic with jig-sawed modillions, and the ensemble is
generally more pleasing. In proportion and precision of workmanship this
woodwork is hardly excelled in Philadelphia. The simple, carefully
wrought dentil course of the doorheads lends a refining influence and
pleasing sense of scale that seems to lighten the design very
materially.

Philadelphia has no handsomer example of the enriched pedime