many other Masonic writers. It is only recently that its authenticity has been doubted. One of the principal questions at issue is whether or not the Edwin who convoked the assembly was the brother of Athelstan. In 1726 Francis Drake, in his speech before the Grand Lodge of York, advanced the opinion that this Edwin was the King of Northumbria, and his words indicate that this fact was well understood by his hearers. He says: "You know we can boast that the first Grand Lodge ever held in England was held in this city, where Edwin, the first Christian King of Northumbria, about the six hundredth year after Christ, and who laid the foundation of our Cathedral, sat as Grand Master."

Masonic experts have for years been at work upon the old records and ancient constitutions, which are exhumed from the great archives of the British Museum, and from the old Lodge libraries, in the effort to separate fiction from fact and myth from history.

While awaiting the final result of their labors, it is probably safe to conclude that about the year 926 an Assembly of Masons was held at York, under the patronage of Edwin, who was either the brother of Athelstan or the King of Northumbria, at which Assembly a code of laws was adopted which became the basis upon which all subsequent Masonic Constitutions were framed.

THE YORK RITE is the oldest of all the rites. and consisted originally of three degrees. 1, Entered Apprentice; 2, Fellow Craft; 3, Master Mason. The last included a part which contained the True Word, but which was taken from it by Dunckerley in the latter part of the Eighteenth century and has never been restored. The nearest approach to the original Rite is the St. John's Masonry of Scotland, "but," says Mackey, "the Master's degree of the Grand Lodge of Scotland is not the Master's degree of the New York Rite. When Dunckerley dismembered the third degree he destroyed the identity of the Rite." (p. 906.) VICISSITUDES OF THE ORDER.-In the beginning of the Eighteenth century Masonry had greatly declined in the southern portion of England, largely on account of the political disturbances which resulted in placing William III. on the throne.

Sir Christopher Wren, the Grand Master in the reign of Queen Anne, had far advanced in years and infirmity, and the general assemblies of the Grand Lodge were no longer held.

In the year 1715 there were only four lodges in the south of England, and they were all in the city of London. Sir Christopher Wren was now dead, and no successor had been appointed. These four lodges therefore called a meeting at the Apple Tree Tavern, and, having put into the chair the oldest Master Mason who was the Master of a lodge, they constituted themselves a Grand Lodge pro tempore in due form and resolved to hold the annual assembly and feast and then to choose from among themselves a Grand Master.

Accordingly, on St. John the Baptist's day, 1717, the annual assembly and feast were held, and Mr. Anthony Sayer was elected Grand Master.

Among its regulations the Grand Lodge adopted the following: "That the privilege of

assembling as Masons, which had hitherto been unlimited, should be vested in certain lodges or assemblies of Masons convened in certain places; and that every lodge to be hereafter convened, except the four old lodges at this time existing, should be legally authorized to act by a warrant from the Grand Master, for the time being, granted to certain individuals by petition, with the consent and approbation of the Grand Lodge in communication, and that without such warrant no lodge should be hereafter deemed regular or constitutional."

The four old lodges had the privileges which they had possessed under the old organization reserved to them under the new arrangement.

The Grand Lodges of York and of London kept up a friendly intercourse until 1725, when the latter body granted a warrant of constitution to some Masons who had seceded from the former.

The Grand Lodge of York resented this unmasonic act, which was followed some years later by another offense. In 1735 the Earl of Crawford, Grand Master of England, constituted two lodges within the jurisdiction of the Grand Lodge of York, and granted without its consent deputations from various localities.

All friendly intercourse now ceased, and from that time the York Masons considered their interests distinct from the Masons under the Grand Lodge in London.

Three years later, in 1738, a few seceders from the Grand Lodge of England held unauthorized meetings for the purpose of initiation, and they also assumed the character of York Masons. They assumed the appellation of "Ancient York Masons," and announced that the early landmarks were preserved only by them. In accordance with this position they branded the others as "Modern Masons."

In 1739 they established a new Grand Lodge in London under the name of the "Grand Lodge of Ancient York Masons." They were soon afterward recognized by the Masons of Scotland and Ireland and were encouraged and fostered by many of the nobility.

The two Grand Lodges continued to exist and to act to a greater or less degree in opposition to each other, extending their schisms into other countries, especially in America, until the year 1813, when, under the Grand Mastership of the Duke of Sussex, they were united under the title of the United Grand Lodge of England.

ELIZABETH A. REED, A. M.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, THE, IN NEW YORK CITY, has recently come into special prominence through the princely bequest to it of some eight million dollars by Jacob S. Rogers, a manufacturer of locomotives and butter at Paterson, N. J. Before this bequest the museum already stood easily at the head of such institutions in America, possessing art works valued at $6,000,000, guarded in a building which has already cost a million dollars and is not yet complete. This great Metropolitan Museum is a private corporation, managed and controlled by a Board of Trustees chosen from its members. It was founded in 1870 by a group of New Yorkers, and chartered the same year. From 1872 the museum occupied the Cruger Mansion, and since 1879 the

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM, NEW YORK.

building in Central Park erected for it by the state. The officers of the corporation for the year ending February, 1902, are as follows: President, Henry G. Marquand; vice-presidents, F. W. Rhinelander and Daniel Huntington; treasurer, W. L. Andrews; secretary, Louis P. Di Cesnola; honorary librarian, W. L. Andrews. In 1879 Gen. L. P. Di Cesnola was chosen director and still holds this office.

The collections of the museum are both varied and extensive. The paintings include examples of nearly all the important schools from the early fifteenth century, down to the present time. The collection of drawings by old masters numbers 851 pieces. The Cesnola collection of Cypriote Antiquities contains stone sculptures, inscriptions, glass, bronzes, gems, objects in gold, ivory, etc., exhumed in Cyprus between 1865 and 1877. Only the collections of the British Museum and of M. de Clercq in Paris are of equal or greater value than that of the Museum in Oriental seals and cylinders. The collection of engraved gems numbers 331, of which most are Roman. The Egyptian antiquities are numerous; the casts of famous statues number 810, and comprise specimens from Egypt, Persia, Assyria, Greece, Rome, France and Italy in the middle ages, and Italy at the renaissance. The reproductions in metal, the Chinese porcelains, the Japanese swords, the laces and musical instruments are all noteworthy collections.

The museum is opened free to the public four days in a week, including Sunday since 1890, though at the sacrifice of many patrons.

MOTOR RACE.-The great Paris-Berlin automobile race which took place in June attracted world-wide attention, and demonstrated the high speed which it is possible to make over good roads with these vehicles.

A race of this description over 744 miles of road traversing something like forty-five towns of more or less importance necessitated perfect organization and the most thorough precautions for the safety of the public. Manufacturers made prodigious efforts to carry off the prizes. All along the route they posted mechanics, most of them riding bicycles, so as to be ready for any emergency. At all towns spare tires were in readiness, with men to assist in putting them on. The money spent on the race was enormous, the cost to one firm alone being reported as over $100,000.

The start was made from Champigny, a short distance east of Paris, on Thursday morning, June 27, 1901, at 3:30. The total number of starters was 110 out of 171 entries, and they comprised 40 large cars, 48 light carriages, 12 voiturettes, and 10 motor cycles. They were sent away at intervals of two minutes each, M. Fournier, the winner, starting third at 3 o'clock and 45 minutes.

The entire route for hundreds of miles was lined with thousands of spectators and the police and soldier guards had the utmost difficulty in keeping the way clear. The dust proved a great source of worry to the drivers, as it was impossible when in a bunch to see far ahead, and accidents were frequent.

Stops over night were made at Aix-la-Chapelle and Hanover.

M. Fournier was the first to arrive at Aix, a distance of 283 miles from Paris, at 12 o'clock and 2 minutes. He started again from Aix on Friday morning at 6 minutes after 5 o'clock, and passed Cologne at 6 o'clock and 19 minutes, seven minutes ahead of Girardot. At Dusseldorf, Girardot had passed Fournier and was one minute in advance. The struggle between the two from here on was most exciting. At Duisburg, Girardot still led by a minute, but at Wesel Fournier was ahead. Fournier reached

Hanover, the second stop (2761⁄2 miles from Aix-la-Chapelle) at 2 o'clock and 13 minutes, 41 minutes in advance of Girardot.

M. Fournier still maintained the lead on Saturday from Hanover to Berlin, where he received an enthusiastic reception from the thousands assembled.

The official time for the three styles of machines is as follows:

LARGE AUTOMOBILES.

1. Fournier, 17 h., 3 m., 43 s. 2. Girardot, 18 h., 9 m., 58 s. 3. R. de Knyff, 18 h., 12 m., 57 s. LIGHT AUTOMOBILES.

1. Giraud, 20 h., 54 m., 52 s. 2. Sincholle, 23 h., 32 m., 53 s. 3. Teste, 23 h., 33 m., 45 s.

MOTOR CYCLES.

1. Osmont, 20 h., 18 m., 48 s.
2. Bardeau, 22 h., 5 m., 58 s.
3. Cormier, 23 h., 29 m., 57 s.

The speed acquired was frequently over 70 miles per hour.

It was at first proposed that the race should be from Paris to St. Petersburg, but the delegates sent by the French Automobile Club to examine the routes found that it was impossible to race in Russian territory, owing to the poor condition of the roads.

MUNICIPAL ART is the term now in popular use for the attempted improvement in our cities. In this way it has come to mean very many different things. Each person employing it may be assumed to employ it in a sense somewhat different from that in which his neighbor understands it. Until the attempted improvements of our towns have been carried much further than they now have, the term itself will lack definiteness, and when those improvements have been carried out, other terms will come to be employed and each be capable of differentiation from all the rest.

The improvement by deliberate purpose of cities and towns has taken the form of sanitation, as in the way of plumbing, sewers, street regulations, care for the examination of those and other similar sanitary devices, and provisions in the building law or elsewhere for the requisite number of sanitary conveniences in office buildings, hotels, private houses and in tenements. It has also taken the form of better policing, the doing away with blind alleys and dark corners of different sorts, perfect lighting by night, of the thoroughfares, large and small, the care of water fronts and the decrease in the number of dark and comparatively inaccessible points among the piers where malefactors can hide. Again, this movement has taken the shape of more seemly and, as it is thought, artistic appliances in the way of street lamps, the signs upon which the names of streets are borne at the corners, fixed seats along the sidewalks to border avenues, the planting of trees in a judicious and previously determined way, and perhaps the provisions of "kiosks," like those in Paris, for advertisements and perhaps even for rent to persons who keep newspaper stands and the like. Finally the doing away with the hideous advertisements and other disfigurements caused by the ener

getic enterprise of private persons, tradesmen or householders, is an important part of this kind of movement toward the bettering of our towns. Thus, in New York the custom of putting watertanks built of staves and hooped like gigantic firkins and set high upon slender bars above the roofs of our buildings is as disfiguring, or nearly so, as the colossal advertising appliances of London-huge placards and posters mounted upon bulletins of enormous size and raised high above the housefronts, so that they are seen against the sky and, besides their ugliness, practically diminish the light received by the windows of the opposite houses as much as two stories added to the actual house-front would do it. In short, the movement for "Municipal Art" has generally, so far, taken the form of an easier and more obvious way of improving a town rather than the difficult and sometimes hopeless one of obtaining better buildings, better monuments, better artistic designs for everything which the public may be thought to care for.

In certain cities of Europe, however, this conscious effort toward improvement has taken the loftier form: thus in certain cities of Belgium and of Northern France a society has been formed which has succeeded in gaining influence at once with the public and with the officials, and the result of this society's efforts has been seen in a far greater harmony to be found among the newer buildings and their surroundings. It is not probable that the new buildings of Antwerp, for instance, are better in design than those of other and less consciously improved continental cities of Europe: but the general aspect of a street-an avenuea square, with small parks and broad walks on either side of them-has been kept constantly in view, and therefore the aspect of the city to a hasty observer is more tempting than might be the aspect of a town in which even better architectural designs were frequent. The distinction has not been carefully made between the aggregate value of the works of art which make up the visible part of a town and the general appearance of comeliness caused by a modern, fresh, new, cleaned-up appearance, as if everything had been planned for the most careful housekeeping and was then put into the hands of a careful housekeeper.

The assertion is frequently made that clean streets must precede the building of fine and interesting houses to front upon those streets; but the reverse is notoriously the case, and many of the most attractive works of architectural art in Europe are in crowded and often dirty streets in which the charm proposed by the municipal art reformers can hardly be said to exist. Nothing, for instance, can exIceed the contrast which streets of such a hilltown as Sienna make with those of an ideal modern city. The Sienna streets are steep; in order to climb the hills they have to be winding; they are abruptly closed off as by the ancient right of property embodied in some old family's palazzo; they are so narrow that the sun hardly reaches their pavements except at intervals, and if the wind blows freely through them it is because the town is set upon a hill so high and bold that even its own ramparts, where they still exist, cannot prevent the air which blows across the flat country

around from reaching every nook of the city. Sienna is exactly that which the more active and more outspoken propagandists of municipal art would object to and would try to do away with. It is the very reverse of the town which the municipal art societies are generally trying to produce, and yet Sienna is full of exquisite monuments of artistic power and of faultless taste, such monuments as the nineteenth century found it impossible to produce or to rival.

It appears, then, that there are two objects to be kept in view by the municipal art societies and by those representatives of municipal authority who have it in charge to carry out the schemes which the societies propose and succeed in recommending to public approval. There is, first, the general aspect of the town, as cited above; its cleanly, sunny, open and wholesome look; and there is also

summer in consequence of the disappearance of the rather impertinent white and yellow fences which interfered with their symmetry and their grandeur, a contrary result was produced with regard to the houses themselves and the domesticity which they must, perforce, furnish and express. Each family's dwelling was injured by the change; privacy was impaired, the safety of the children at play upon the lawns or in the garden was greatly diminished (for even in New York City parents send their children and nursemaids in preference to those of the parks which still retain their iron fences, against which, at least, the run-away horse would rise up in vain!) and the extremely harsh, disproportionate and characterless architecture of the houses was brought out in painful prominence. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a better instance of the bad effect of hastily applied and insufficiently con

the question of procuring the best possible work of art in every instance when the opportunity is offered to build anew, or to seriously modify an existing structure. The example of some of the New England villages may be taken as sufficiently expressive of both of these tendencies. On the one hand there was the movement twenty-five years ago to throw down the fences which inclosed the "dooryards" of the smaller and the "grounds" of the larger residences, and on the other hand there was the constantly renewed question of whether a new house, and still more, a new town hall or church, was, or could be made beautiful, or, at least, partly attractive. The first step, that of doing away with the fences, was taken up rather hastily, and while the towns have gained in a general park-like appearance, their long, straight avenues of elms and maples seeming more forest-like, more verdant, more umbrageous and pleasant in

One is

sidered change in the aspect of a town. reminded by this of the singular results which have taken place in different European cities when, as in Frankfort-on-the-Main, about 1875, a narrow and gloomy street was widened into a broad avenue, and the picturesque but long uncared-for and now forlorn row of gabled houses on one side of it was left looking across two hundred feet of open promenade. They were effective pieces of domestic architecture; and the street was destined to be a part of a new, modern city of considerable relative charm; but the two things were hopelessly out of harmony one with the other, and it was almost to be accepted as not wholly an evil when the ancient houses began rapidly to disappear.

The most remarkable piece of work of this kind was that carried out in Paris at the close of the Second Empire. The new Opera House having been decided upon, the plans of Charles Garnier accepted, and the site for the large

building fixed, it was then in place to cut a broad straight avenue leading from this new monument to the ancient Louvre. Right in the way there rose a hill, once high and vying with that celebrated rise of ground upon which stands the Pantheon and dominates all of Paris south of the Seine. This hill, however, gradually diminished in height during the ages, while at the same time in certain localities it was even increased in height by the accumulation of rubbish-upon which newer houses had been built. This hill, a celebrated part of Paris in the old days, was covered thick with interesting buildings of the ancient type; buildings not very important architecturally, but of singular value historically. The record of Old Paris, and of its frequent rebuildings, was written in those houses and the churches which were crowded among them, better than in any other part of the great city. The broad avenue was cut straight through this crowded mass of ancient constructions; and it was at this time and apropos of these buildings thus cut mercilessly into and opened up to the light of day that Alphonse Daudet wrote one of his most touching and most valuable social papers, that in which he laments the condition which had driven and were driving the Parisian workman away from the center of his activities.

That most skillful, practiced, tasteful artist, the Paris ouvrier, had lived, says Daudet, from generation to generation close to his workshop. Every day, before noon, he came home to the family déjeuner. Every day after the hours of work he came home to the family diner. The excursions which he took, he took with his family; the life which he, like a good fellow as he was, was content with and loved was a family life. But, says Daudet, the new conditions are these that the workman must go fifteen kilomèters to his work and return in the evening, so that the noonday meal can no longer be taken with wife and children but must perforce be the public repast taken at the wine shop, a far less admirable thing. Illustrations of this same unfortunate tendency are not far to seek in Paris itself. The student of city plans must always be offended by the too great opening up of the heart of Paris into vast spaces for display, for occasional popular fetes, for magnificence; spaces admirably treated, surrounded by buildings of extreme interest, but too large. Let us for a moment imagine ourselves in the Place de la Concorde, standing with our back to the river and, therefore, facing northward, looking toward the entrance of the Rue Royale, through which is seen, more distant, the front of the Madeleine. On the north side of the Place de la Concorde and separated from one another only by the Rue Royale, are the two admirable façades dating from the time of Louis XV and the work of Jacques Ange Gabriel. At a hundred feet, at twice that distance, at three hundred feet even, those buildings are of extraordinary interest and show themselves to be what they are of the very highest range and scope of neoclassic art. But at the distance of a thousand feet, which the Place de la Concorde allows; or of seven or eight hundred feet

ARCH OF TRIUMPH, PARIS.

which the Place de la Concorde seems almost to command, the charm of those exquisite fronts is gone; the columns are then too slender, the shade against which they are relieved is too profound, the super-imposed entablature and its accessory structure are too massive, the basement is too square and pronounced, at the ends, and in the center is cut by its open arches into isolated piers; in fact, the charm of the building is partly gone when its anatomy and logical significance are, through distance, partly lost. But apart from this, and ignoring for the moment these buildings, important as they are to the history of French and of European art, consider that the Place de la Concorde, huge as it is, six hundred by one thousand feet, or thereabout, is but a single and even a minor link in a great chain of open spaces which is carried without a break other than that supplied by railings and screens of trees from the angles of the Louvre Museum and the Ministry of Finance west northwest to the Rond Point, a distance of exactly two kilomèters-a mile and a quarter. It is charming, but it is too large. The different squares that make it up, the Place du Carrousel, the Jardin des Tuileries, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysées, each of them would be more attractive if it were surrounded by buildings and visibly limited. To stand at the southern end of the Place de la Concorde, at the head of the bridge, and look northeast, a thousand feet, to the Ministère de la Marine, one of the two Gabriel buildings cited above, and southward more than half as far to the front of the Palais Bourbon (the Chamber of Deputies), with its decastyle portico and rich pediment filled with sculpture; and then to look eastward and westward in general direction and realize how vast is the open space, is to realize also that the whole of Paris is to a certain extent sacrificed by this and the similar enormous reservations. Rows of horse-chestnut trees are splendid and they are restful. nor could anyone object to the presence of a park in the heart of a town. Rus in urbe has always been a by-word for something very desirable indeed. But there is sense in limitation, too, and if it were a question of which is the more beautiful in an urban sense, this