d 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 symbols of architecture, which undeniably have more
of _knowledge_ than _love_ in them,--so accustomed have the people
become to these things, that the great art of which these have been the
only language now almost invariably fails to strike any responsive chord
in the human heart or to do any of that work which it is the peculiar
province of the fine arts to accomplish. Instead of leadi