would be trusted to turn out a garment properly stitched, of the desired description, and of the same cut as other people wear. The result of this confidence is ordinarily most satisfactory to both parties: the workman's manual labour is relieved by the sense of independence, and is elevated by the exercise of thought; while the paymaster attends to his ordinary affairs during the progress of the undertaking, and in the end gets his money's worth as in any ordinary mercantile transaction. But having once dismissed the builder—as if to prove how little lie cares for art in the abstract—the owner generally proceeds to disfigure his new possession by blocking up a niche or two with mud or clumsy masonry, screening the arch with a piece of tattered matting, or smearing the jambs of the doorway with daubs of red paint and whitewash.
The gain to artistic interests, and the saving to the Exchequer, would be enormous, if a similar amount of reasonable confidence in its employés were exhibited by Government in the execution of its public works. It need not really regard æsthetic considerations any more highly than the typical baniya does; but it would get its work done well and cheaply, and thus would not forfeit its character for practical common sense, even though some traces of good design still survived after many years of utilitarian ill-usage.
A happy example of thoroughly Hindu treatment, as practised at the present day in the absence of any direction from without, is afforded by a small, but very elaborate, gateway, for which the town of Khurja is indebted to Lála Lachhman Dás, a well-to-do trader, who is remodelling his house in the bazar there; the work being designed and carried out by Dhúla, a Bráhman architect, who lives at the neighbouring town of Háthras, in the Aligarh district. A photograph would be impossible; for though the main façade of the house looks on to a fairly broad street, the porch stands in a little side lane which is scarcely broad enough for two foot passengers to walk abreast. The introduction of animal sculpture, the exuberance of surface decoration, and the unsuitableness of the site selected for its display, are all features curiously characteristic of the best and worst points in the Hindu craftsman. In his devotion to the perfect rendering of each separate detail, as it comes under his hand, he too little considers the ultimate destination of the whole; while any faculty for reproducing the beauty of the human or other animate form has been completely destroyed by ages of
