The mention of Stanford White suggests a topic more creditable to himself than his death, and also possessing a different and wider interest. Stanford White, whatever may have been his private life, was the greatest architect in America. Some of the finest buildings in New York are due to his signal genius, and here I am led on to reflections of a yet more extensive kind. My own impression was that architecture in America generally possesses a vitality which to-day is absent from it in older countries. This observation is pertinent to New York more especially. New York being built on a narrow island, it has there become necessary, to a degree hardly to be paralleled elsewhere in the world, to extend new buildings not laterally, but upward. To this living upward pressure are due the towering structures vulgarly called "skyscrapers." These, if properly understood, resemble rather the old campanili of Italy, and suggest the work of Giotto. They make New York, seen from a distance, look like a San Gimignano reconstructed by giants. I am, however, thinking not of the "skyscrapers" only. I am thinking rather of buildings, lofty indeed, but not tower-like, such as certain clubs, blocks of residential flats, or business premises in Fifth Avenue--such, for instance, as those of the great firm of Tiffany. Though metal frameworks are, no doubt, embedded in these, the stonework is structurally true to the strains of the metal which it incases, and the stones of the rusticated bases might have been hewn and put together by Titans. We have more here than an academic repetition of bygone tastes and models. We have an expression in stone of the needs of a new world.