ture, at all events, which is the mother of all the arts, the example unfortunately has as yet been never given.
A partial explanation of the neglect may perhaps be found in the fact that, so far as the Supreme Government is concerned, circumstances have allowed it no option. It has been obliged to import foreign models; for neither in the swamps of Calcutta, nor on the heights of Simla, has any indigenous form of architecture been available for adoption. The Bengali has simply a talent for imitation, and has never invented a style for himself in any branch of art; while the Himalayan mountaineer was too backward in civilization to feel any need for it. With most of the Provincial Governments the case is far different. They are seated in the centres of old Indian culture. But the fashion of occidentalism, however incongruous with the local environment, has permeated from above; and the only patronage hitherto vouchsafed to native architecture is limited to an artificial and purely scholastic form, in the restoration of the dead past, and is not extended to the development of the living present.
A shocking travesty of Italian, or rather French design, is exhibited in a gateway, which one of the principal Muhammadan gentlemen in the district has had under construction for the last three or four years. It forms the entrance to the courtyard of his family residence at Dánpur, and is of considerable dimensions, being 92 feet long and 70 feet deep. The cost will be in proportion, and it is truly lamentable that want of taste and the influence of bad example should be thus conspicuously illustrated. The incongruous quasi-Indian plinth, in conjunction with an attenuated order of tall rusticated pilasters supporting imitation chimneypots, and the clumsy carpentry of the windows with their jerky and most ungainly dressing and ill-proportioned pediments, make up a tout ensemble, which for rococo vulgarity, could scarcely be surpassed. The material is stone, but it requires a close inspection to realize the fact; the extreme coarseness of all the details being so much more suggestive of plaster. In spite of ridicule and remonstrance, and repeated offers to supply a design more in harmony with national precedent, my friend has an unanswerable rejoinder:—"The works, he says, which are carried out under your direction, however pleasing in themselves, have the one fatal drawback that they are not stamped with official approval. In fact, one of them was denounced by a competent departmental authority as an absolute 'eye-sore.' Nothing in the same style
