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Phryne or an Aspasia. The true-seeing eye will do full justice alike to the slender luxuriance of the Alhambra and the chaste proportions of the temple of Minerva, to the unspeakable shapeliness of the Taj, the massive sternness of the nave of Gloucester cathedral, and the solemn gracefulness of Westminster abbey. All these are very beautiful in their several ways; but no two of them will bear to be tried by the same rules of conventional art. Each of us will doubtless prefer that one which comes nearest his own pet ideal; but in a candid mind they will all awaken more or less markedly the same flow of satisfied ecstasy that wells up at the hearing of "Home, sweet home," or Handel's "Te Deum;" at the reading of "Macbeth" or the "Lotus-eaters;" at the sight of Mont Blanc, the Thames at Richmond, or, best of all, a beautiful and well-dressed English lady.

With regard to the Popish character of Gothic art, we think that very little need be said here. Its connection with Romish tenets seems about as easy to make out as that of Irish protestantism with a keen hatred of wooden shoes. They who put forth so very wild a charge-which might as fairly be applied to clocks, cannon, fiddles, town-halls, salmon-fishing, archery, and a hundred other things in present use-only remind us of that unhappy gentleman who saw the spectre dodging every where among his curtains, and perversely declining to become invisible, even when the doctor had planted his own body right in front of the unwelcome visitor. There is one style of Gothic indeed pre-eminently popish—the starved, unwholesome, spiritless style of a modern Jesuit college or chapel, which bears much the same resemblance to genuine Gothic, that a glorified saint of the Orcagna pattern bears to the living flesh and blood of Raphael's Madonnas.

The two chief fallacies first named commonly twist about each other like the strands in a cable, and one line of argument will settle both. There is every possible kind of evidence to shew, that England had for many hundred years a distinctly national architecture, called not unmeaningly the Gothic, which can be traced through all its continual changes, from the Saxon of many days before the conquest, down to the corrupted forms of

the Stuart period. What kind of architecture that was, how rich in ever-changing beauties, how flexible in its multiform developments, how suitable to every phase of social feeling, to every purpose of social life-how stately, awful, tender, severe, graceful, humorous, quiet, ornate, cheerful or sad by turns-any one may guess who has ever tarried among the exquisite details of the medieval courts at Sydenham, or turned over the pages of Mr. Parker's instructive volumes, or travelled over a few English counties, or passed a single day among the curiosities of an old cathedral city. From all parts of the country hosts of witnesses seem to rise up in its favour, faster than one could call them over. In the yet living grandeur of Canterbury, Warwick, Windsor, and the ruined glories of Raglan, Tintern, Mayfield, and Netley-in the picturesque stateliness of Newstead, Knole, Penshurst, and Holland house-in noble old parish churches at Bristol, Dorchester, Boston-in the crowded beauties of matchless Oxford, or the quaint old houses of quiet Dartmouthin many a humble village, where a grey church-tower, or an ivy-clasped cottage with its tall gables, cosy porch, and wide oriel, shines gem-like through the surrounding commonplace, he who runs may read the lessons such things assuredly proclaim to all eyes that dare to look out for truth alone. During all those centuries England clearly had one order of architecture, common alike to church and castle, to country-house and college, to the highest devotional purposes and the lowest earthly needs; and that order was the Gothic-not the Gothic of France or Germany, nor the bastard Gothic of southern Europe; but a growth peculiar to this country, drawn chiefly from its old Saxon roots, then quickened by wholesale grafts of our Norman kindred, and always modified from time to time by a thousand silent influences, like unto those which shape out for good or evil the character of every rational member of an organized brotherhood.

Had the people of England ever been broadly divided into several distinct castes, or into two great bodies of an overruling priesthood and an obedient laity, one might have looked for some marked unlikeness between the essential features of a monastery and a baron's castle, of a church or chapel and a private dwelling

house. But the facts are far otherwise. Even in the days of born thralls and cruel forest-laws, English society was never built in horizontal layers, and the lower we come to our own times, the more gradually do different classes seem to blend and dovetail into each other. Brahminism was unknown, and our kings have never offered public sacrifices, as Roman consuls and emperors were sometimes wont to do. The halls of Christchurch, Hampton court, or Penshurst, bear the same close family likeness to Merton chapel or Westminster abbey, that the Alhambra palace bears to a mosque in Cairo, or a mausoleum in Agra. Raglan castle and Tintern abbey look much like copies slightly altered from one same pattern. The comely old manor-house, with its clustering gables, arched doorways, and large mullioned windows, set here and there in charming disorder, stands halfway between the grandeur of Windsor castle or "Tom Quadrangle" and the simple beauty of a Devonshire cottage, with its quaint wooden porch, and pretty little lattice windows nestling under, or maybe peering out from, the tall roof of overhanging thatch.

And the more we con the fruitful records of that long architectural past, the easier it becomes to mark how thoroughly the buildings of each successive age can tell their own story to our times. From the scantier remains of ancient Saxondom, we pass to the more varied monuments of Norman and early English kings and priests and barons; stout old rock-built castles with broad moats and frowning keeps, massive old church towers once fit to stand a siege, a few monasteries of like strength, one or two old Oxford colleges, part of the great hall of Westminster, and parts of some great cathedrals. Thenceforth the stream of evidence keeps ever widening, and embracing new forms of social life; grim old castles, with their small rooms and low stories, give way to princely palaces with noble banquet-halls, and gateways battlemented less for use than show; gloomy-looking naves and towers are relieved or displaced by the long-drawn aisles and fairy-vaulted choirs of York, Westminster, or Glo'ster, and by the graceful heaven-reaching spires of Salisbury and Lichfield; the monks of Tintern and Netley rear their glorious piles; and Oxford grows more and more beautiful with stately yet calm-looking quadrangles, where the scholar may pause from

severer studies, to feast in halls or worship in chapels that proclaim at once the bountiful devotion and princely taste of their several founders. And now the dwelling-houses of different kinds, the pretty parsonage, the straggling grange, and the lowly cottage, begin to dot the country with their picturesque forms, just visible through the roadside elms, instead of huddling and hiding together behind the walls of a few scattered towns. And as, in the early warlike days, every building seemed like a fortress, and walls of immense thickness let in the light of day through mere slits and defensive loopholes, and floors were strewn with sand or ashes, and gentlemen lay on straw, and comfort meant plenty of salt beef and strong ale; so in those later times of growing peace and refinement, architecture took its tone from passing circumstances, disguising rude strength and naked grandeur by a show of airy polished grace, and an easy wealth of plastic decoration; breaking up its main lines with many a deep buttress, or tapering pinnacle, or carved turret; revelling in doorways of richest moulding, in windows of noble size and exquisite tracery, in clusters of tall slender shafts crowned by capitals of matchless beauty, in roofs of manybranching timbers or finely carven stone, whose every boss or curve brings out the strength or beauty of the whole design.

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were perhaps the palmiest days of our national architecture. In the sixteenth its fashion changed not always for the better; and with the days of puritan ascendency its downward course was quickened into a run. Marred already by the unwholesome breath of the miscalled new-birth in Italy, and further left to stagnate during the civil wars, it seemed wholly to fade out under the combined encroachments of German coarseness and French irreligion. It was a bad day for the poor sufferer, when the genius of Sir Christopher Wren was employed to raise his Palladian masterpiece on the ruins of old St. Paul's. Noble as it is on the whole, its ugly windows sufficiently prove the inability of even so great a master to conquer the inherent faultiness of the style he made so popular. His feeble successors have, for the most part, been content to repeat and multiply the ugly windows, without any of the beauties which had once relieved them. And so, for many a

long day, darkness ruled over the land of Walter de Merton and William of Waynfleet, of Wykeham and Wolsey, and nearly all sympathy with their glorious conceptions died out from a world of intellectual scoffers and gambling libertines; and while our finest old buildings were sinking into uncared-for decay, nothing was to be seen in their stead but uncouth, unmeaning parodies of old Greek or new Italian styles, the latter being themselves a compound of several others, and hardly liker what they pretended to be than a Burmese pagoda is like a Mahomedan mosque.

But the reaction came at last. Gothic art was not dead, but sleeping. Its spirit is once more at work, reflecting and modifying by turns the general progress of a refined and serious age. The great poets, and the one great novelist of the last generation, did much to deepen the newly-awakened sympathy for a past whose monuments looked so very beautiful even in their worst decay, and whose romantic charms were heighteued by the very ignorance which had so long surrounded them. Consciously or unconsciously the old forms began to repeat themselves in various disguises; Gothic churches and Gothic country-houses sprang up slowly here and there, and within sight of Whitehall, Somerset house, and the stately palaces in Pall Mall, the noble terrace and magnificent towers of Barry's immortal, if somewhat costly pile, proclaimed the dawn of a new artistic era, in which England should once more make good her broken connection with the triumphs and dreams of her lusty, earnest youth. She had emerged at last from a state of seeming activity but real stagnation, like that which comes on most men after the first lull of youthful enthusiasm, to enter once more, as every. true man is sooner or later sure to do, on that lifelong struggle towards spiritual perfection from which she had too readily turned away. The Westminster palace has fairly turned the scale of national feeling against those champions of classic art, who regard the Royal Exchange and the Post-Office as worthy substitutes for a style that abhors all groundless ornament, and never aims at producing absurd and incongruous effects.

In very truth, if people only looked for that, they would see every where daily recurring signs of a national architecture still

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