[Illustration: A COUNTRY HOUSE, SAN MATEO, CAL.
To make his audience at the Brooklyn Tabernacle laugh the late Dr. Talmage called the Queen Anne style the most abominable of all styles of architecture. But when legitimately developed there is nothing the matter with the Queen Anne style at all. It was the Jacobin and bastard features without antecedents and _raison d’être_ that brought it into ridicule, and caused a composite style of American dwelling-house, Queen Anne in motive but Romanesque in detail, to make the necessary apologies to the public in the guise of an improved substitute. (See Plate LXV.) Though an avowed composition crossed by this strain and by that, the Queen Anne substitute was yet academic and correct in all its detail, and has survived to this day. I mean to say that this ingenious composite style is still exploited by representative architects. It can be made to simulate home-feeling after a fashion, although there is always that bizarre note present which characterizes fashion as its first object, while by no stretch of the imagination may we associate our ancestors or history with such a palpably modern American suburbanite as is illustrated herewith.
I know not whose perspicacity it was that first discovered in the Colonial exemplars of the Grand Epoch a fashion the popularity of which was soon to eclipse all the foregoing fashions I have enumerated, and which, moreover, continues to be most in vogue. But the Colonial germ, during the early eighties, seems to have been in the air and sporadic throughout the country. It is the greatest fallacy, however, to say, as many learned reviewers of Colonial architecture do, that its symmetry, restfulness and good proportion generally caused it to rise superior to other schools of design, because that is not true. The preceding styles properly developed all had compensating virtues. The secret of the Colonial revival was the same inherent vital spark that had previously commended the Queen Anne architecture, only the Colonial houses possessed it to a far greater degree. For it was not only English history, always intimately associated with our own, that they expressed, but authentic memoirs of the American people themselves.