Ventilation can only be considered in connection with art and beauty because there can be no enjoyment of either without health, and health is now seen to be largely dependent on our sanitary conditions. A pretty room stabbed through with knife-like draughts, or stuffy and pervaded by drain-odours, no more agrees with the lovers of the fit and beautiful than an airy comfortable one coloured with Judson's dyes. But the difficulties of ventilating rooms which are fashionably crowded are nearly insuperable, because a certain number of cubic feet of fresh air ought only to be breathed by a certain number of lungs, whereas, when too many people inhabit the space, the air ought to be mechanically changed with adequate speed, and this can surely only be done by a pump.

Tobin's method, which brings the outside air into rooms through pipes which are carried some feet up the sides of walls, is perhaps the cheapest and most efficacious. It can be applied by any intelligent builder, and the pipes, whether angular or round, can be decorated in such a way as to rather improve than detract from the look of the room. Beauty in a room does not consist in unbroken planes of colour from corner to corner; and any jutting object ought to be hailed as an opportunity, as the old illuminators hailed a flaw in the vellum. A pipe therefore can be covered with arabesques in paint or moulded stucco, and made part of the fabric of the wall with a little ingenuity. It could be treated architecturally as the stalk of a large conventionalised flower. See what the ancient Egyptians did with the lotus, what innumerable subjects they drew from that one plant; and how easily they could have made a Tobin pipe into a column or portion of a column, fluted up into flower forms. A hollow flower could easily disguise the ugly and lumpish point of ingress for the air, which could be as well regulated behind fluted petals as behind any other angles.

Or such pipes at regular intervals could be enlarged into slight columns supporting a lightly relieved arcade, forming well-shaped panels for decoration. Again, the conventional halbert which relieves every corner in old Dutch architecture at once suggests itself as a capital cloak for Tobin pipes. A very little thought will model such a halbert as would appear bound to the wall, its fringed spike boldly relieved, in brass or iron, gilt or no. People's fancy as to the proper height for the ingress of the air varies. I have seen pipes only three or four feet high, in a casing broad enough to support a vase which pierced at bottom would seem to be standing on a square bracket, while in reality it admitted the air. I have seen others running up to within a short space of the cornice, for which the halbert idea is adapted.

The low pipes certainly sometimes create disagreeable draughts; but probably if they were placed so that the draughts were carried up instead of across the rooms inconveniently near our shoulders, such annoyance would not be felt.

The system adopted at the House of Commons, whereby the admitted air is warmed by passing over hot rollers, and moistened by spray, is most perfect of all, but it is costly - not more so than many people could afford, if they chose to spend their vast incomes so wisely - but too costly for the majority of the ventilating public. Gas is so apt to heat as well as desiccate the air that some spray-apparatus for moistening the air at evening parties would indeed be a boon. Meantime, numerous revolving fountains (of water, not scent) or large blocks of ice decorated with roses and creeping ivy, are the nearest approach to it; and while cooling and moistening the air they form a very lovely ornament. The latter plan has become common since I first suggested it twelve years ago in 'St. Paul's Magazine,' the more so as ice can be manufactured so easily and inexpensively.