vation of that graceful masterpiece of perpendicular art, the church of St. Mary Redcliffe, at Bristol. The grand old pile at Canterbury, and its less known sister at Ely, have both been restored in a manner worthy of their old fame. The beautiful chapel of Merton College has been rescued in good time from the decay into which it seemed fast falling. And many an old, time-scarred, mean-looking parish church has, with the help of a few tools and a little patience, been made to reveal strange glimpses of a beauty all unforeshadowed in the stories of the oldest remaining villager.

But of any wholly new developments of older art few signs have hitherto been borne up to the surface of passing affairs. Our architects generally content themselves with repeating some pet tune through any number of slight changes; while art-professing builders can only succeed in treating us to a very lame and mangled rendering of the tune they specially affect to play. Most of our modern churches are either new editions, revised and sometimes altered, of well-known originals, early English, decorated, or perpendicular; or they are mere stiff, ungainly, pretentious samples of that conventional style which passes with the vulgar for real Gothic, but savours to more tutored minds of the worst spirit of paltry meeting-house barbarism. As a work of modern art, and a specimen of costly, if not always tasteful decoration, the new church in Margaret Street stands nearly alone among English essays of a recent date, and may fairly claim high rank with those of any former age. Even that is less remarkable for its individual forcefulness than for its happy adaptation to the wants of a very peculiar site. Another sample of rare excellence shines forth in the new church of All Souls, Halifax, built by the architect of the new improvements made at Exeter college, Oxford. Fashioned and furnished after the taste of that age, when the simpler beauties of the early English were first relieved by somewhat of that ornamental richness which marked the later decorated style, this noble record of Mr. Scott's genius speaks as loudly for the good sense as for the princely liberality of the patron who left his architect free to carry out, as seemed best to him, the work his own munificence had set going. In the graceful bold

ness of its outlines, the stately proportions of its spire-topt tower, the effective forms and archings of its deep-cut windows, the general beauty of its carved and painted work, and the careful finish of every detail within and without, there is surely much to enchain the most fastidious eye. The inside of this church especially, from roof to floor, from transept to transept, is one rich yet noble harmony of expressive forms and colours.1 And yet the last result of all that beauty is rather to remind us of the past than to lead us onward in the future. At any rate, with one or two exceptions, no thoroughly original genius has yet left his mark on the architecture of this age. We have still, as it were, to master the very rudiments of an art whose final teachings have been scattered to the winds by the blundering of ignorant interpreters, or overlaid by the dust and cobwebs of ages of neglect. After a long night of sleepy bewilderment, varied by reckless wandering after false lights, our first steps to a purer knowledge must needs be taken backward among the past centuries, in search of lost clues and mislaid appliances. Our faulty bearings have to be set right. Like parrots, monkeys, and young children, we are fain just now to imitate, without understanding, what the men of other days have done. In good time, we trust, it may be given us too to act for ourselves, to take our stand on the same common ground of first principles, and to shew that the informing spirit of our old architecture could rise again to astonish the world with new triumphs over the materials wherewith it happens to work.

Meanwhile that hopeful prospect lies very dim in the cloudy distance. Few of us, in this age of stir and struggle, have yet got even a glimmering notion what those principles really are. Architecture itself is not a subject on which many

1 Talking of Mr. Scott, all lovers of true art must regret to hear that his beautiful and masterly design for a town hall in Halifax, on its finest site, has been rejected, by a municipal clique opposed to his great supporter Mr. Akroyd, in favour of a "classical" design, by Barry it is true, but in a bye street, with no frontage, and without one large room: a town hall, in fact, without a hall! Such an issue will, of course, wear a very different face to those who look out for fresh samples of that "new style" which some enthusiasts saw budding in the Crystal Palace, and which a writer in the Builder for 10th November congratulated his readers was being daily developed in "the new asylums and almshouses." Town halls, it would appear, from motives we suspect to be partly political, partly pecuniary at least in Halifax, are still to form a melancholy exception,

people care to think deeply, or dare to have very decided opinions of their own. Not being troubled with Lord Palmerston's weakness, they would rather leave all that to the professional men. A Corinthian column with a standing figure a-top-a mighty portico that leads in to nothing—a wing in sham Gothic, added on to a frontage in debased Romanan arch surmounted by a huge equestrian statue-all pass with most of them for the right sort of thing, especially if they have cost a heavy sum to build. They have no time, if they ever have the will, to ask themselves why a statue should be set up in the clouds beyond the power of human recognition, or what business a Corinthian column has in a country, of whose various settlers none ever came from Hellas, and whose architecture has nothing in common with any known monuments of the land where Lais flirted, and "Timoleon's brother bled." A glaring mixture of impure styles will often escape the censure of eyes unnaturally sharpened to pick out the flaw in a neat-looking bonnet, or the weak point in a well-turned ankle. And the professional men themselves are often no better than blind guides. Not only have our leading architects shewn hitherto slight proofs of truly creative power, but hardly six of them all seem qualified to interpret for the outside world the simplest teachings of their art. Delirant reges. If the question of a national architecture is still to settle-if the Tites and Barrys of the profession can still be found ready to make a death-stand against the daring beauties of Mr. Scott's modernized Gothic-it is no wonder that the unthinking and unlearned many should either let themselves float away on a sea of ignorant fallacies, or settle, like Gallio, into a state of thorough indifference touching the points at issue. While even gentlemen of superior parts, varied accomplishments, and some early acquaintance with the good things of classical lore, can be guilty of such reckless blunders as one may continually mark, or hear them making in parliament and elsewhere, we can hardly look for tokens of a sounder knowledge, or a deeper interest in these matters, among those who stand on the lower levels of our social life.

There are at least two enormous fallacies still current among all classes at this day. One is, that we have and can have no

such thing as a national architecture; the other, that, even if Gothic be best for building churches, it cannot anyhow adapt itself to all our private and secular wants. To these we might almost add a third, that Gothic was merely the barbarous outcome of a popish age, and cannot therefore be worthy to shew forth the wondrous movements of this enlightened era. That these, and other like fallacies, have been ably combated and eloquently disproved again and again-that Messrs. Scott and Ruskin have but lately dealt them most telling blows-that the works of Messrs. Parker and Ferguson, and the very pictures in the Illustrated News, rise up in ceaseless protest against them, we need hardly remind the general reader. But for all that they continue to hold their ground.

"Non Hydra secto corpore firmior,

Vinci dolentem crevit in Herculem,"

than these idols of the market keep facing the combined attacks of reason and information. Lop off one of their heads, and swiftly comes another in its stead. Gothic may do for a church, perhaps even for a college or an almshouse; but how about a railway station or a bridge? Folks may choose what style they please for their own dwellings, but we will have no enthusiasts meddling with our public offices. Even should a select committee decide in their favour, we will admit none of their old-world revivals into Downing Street. And then, if you still refuse to chime in with the vulgar creed, you are bidden to look with shame at that new church in the west end, or those new dwelling-houses, crisp with "carpenters' Gothic," in some rising watering-place, both of them run up by builders, or planned by gentlemen whose notions of pure Gothic were about as accurate as those of Lord Palmerston are on the difference between old Grecian and later Roman art.

That a style so infinitely expressive as the Gothic most assuredly is so rich in striking forms and cumulative effects-so simple in its essential parts, yet capable of well-nigh boundless adornment-so musical in its seeming discords, and graceful amid its wildest imaginings, should by any sane person have been considered barbarous, is a startling proof of the wide range of human possibilities. During the last century or so,

such a notion came naturally enough to men who took their manners and morals also from the French; who thought Congreve better than Shakspeare; read Chaucer by the light of Pope and Dryden; and could hardly keep from yawning over Gray. When the mighty Elizabethan drama was judged by French rules, and Strawberry Hill was a pitiful exception to the rage for pitiful parodies of a foreign style, itself but a bastard offspring of old Rome, you could hardly wonder at the eyes that saw no special beauty in those soaring spires-those towers that, slender or massive, singly or in pairs, brooded in calm majesty over clustering roofs of noble pitch and broken outlines -that long vista of graceful pillars bearing up tiers of arches till all seemed blended in one over-arching glory, like that of a stately palm-forest in Ceylon. In those days, whatever was unclassic-that is, unborrowed, true to English nature—was deemed barbarous. But how, in these latter days of spiritual renewing, enlarged tastes, and unsparing worship of nature, any man of sense and learning can hold to so un-English a belief, is more than our limited reason can quite explain.

"The eye sees only what it brings with it, the power of seeing." There is a colour-blindness of the soul as well as of the body. It is a narrow unartistic mind that refuses to see well-ordered beauty under the most different shapes. Do the twining periwinkle and the clustering wild-thyme belong to a more barbarous type of comeliness than the rose, the hyacinth, or the tulip? Do we better appreciate Shakspeare the more we disparage Dryden? or is Byron's poetry the less wonderful because he did not write in the style of Tennyson? Has Beethoven less music than Mozart? No man of large heart and broad culture would think of measuring all forms of beauty by one Procrustes-pattern. No man of deep feeling would dare to call Gothic art barbarous, any more than he would blame our greatest poet for not having obeyed the rules of Aristotle. There is a beauty of York minster, and a beauty of St. Paul's cathedral; a beauty as grand, orderly, and intelligible in the one as in the other. To set up either of them as the one true standard of absolute grace, would be as absurd as to find fault with a lovely Englishwoman for not having the shape and features of a