beauty, serves also to enhance the strongly religious character of Gothic architecture; a character more or less wanting to any of the classic or bastard classic styles. If St. Paul's, with its gloriously hung central dome, awakens in us no very lively workings of religious awe, the Greek temple, with all its Circean gracefulness, speaks in yet fainter accents to our inmost soul. To any one who knows aught of Paris, for instance, there is nothing more remarkable than the contrast in this particular between the Madeleine and Notre Dame. In the one you seem transported to a temple of the olden creed, where all is noble. harmonious, well-proportioned, but hardly a thought of worship enters your head. The beauty around you is too formal, too smooth, too sharply outlined to pierce down to the lower depths of your spiritual being. In that relentless daylight, amid those clear conceptions that bound you on every side, the sense of awe and mystery dies away for want of any relieving shadow. There is no intervening cloud to show off the infinite depths of blue sky beyond it. But go to the other church, or, better still, to our own Westminster Abbey, and you will find the sense of mere beauty overpowered by one of abiding awe. You feel yourself standing at once on holy ground, afar from the glare and bustle of a world you have left but two paces behind. In the mellowed lights and deep shadows that move along those vague vistas, and lose themselves in that airy roof, the Infinite Presence shines out like the stars at lonely midnight, and invites the soul of man to closer communings with the world from which it came. As to him who looks on a landscape, surrounding objects loom larger in the deepening twilight, so here, by sacrificing breadth to length and height, by an intricate arrangement of vertical lines and broken surfaces, by a careful evolution of endless details, the mind is impressed with those feelings of infinite vastness and awful mystery, which lead it by an easy step to fall down and worship the Great Unseen.

Out of this marked religiousness of Gothic art sprang, in all likelihood, some part of the vulgar prejudice against employing it for domestic purposes. Simple folk, who had not been much used to mix religion with their daily life, setting it apart to attend their Sunday bonnets to the weekly service, may really

have thought it sacrilege to live in houses built after the fashion of ancient monasteries, even as the wife of Parson Adams held it blasphemy for her husband to quote scripture out of church. . It is not long since Mr. Caird's sermon seemed like the announcement of a new gospel to many who had practically sided with Mrs. Adams. Many people too there are, who doubtless forget that Gothic like religion may have its cheerful side, and that all art of a high order adapts itself with easy flexibility to every new phase of national growth. But the true artist will not allow that Gothic has ceased to be because our manners have undergone an extensive change, any more than the true poet will allow that the elements of poetry have died out of a land whose cities overflow with tokens of unresting toil and traffic, whose countless factories send up their grim shafts against the lurid sky, and whose furthest corners echo all day long to the thunder of madly rushing railway trains.

: We have already shown that this style was never reserved for sacred or even ecclesiastical purposes alone, and that during its palmiest days it embraced nearly as many different kinds of building, as masons and bricklayers are required to put together even in these inventive days. But for all that, ancient prejudices are hard to overthrow, and ignorance has powerful backers in the jealousy, perverseness, and self-interest of many who cannot well plead ignorance alone in excuse of their fierce hostility to the claims of an old and still useful, though long-neglected style. However vast may be Lord Palmerston's ignorance of those questions on which he speaks the most positively, the rancour wherewith Messrs. Tite, Coningham, and others of that school, have railed at the preference given by public award to an architect who has not only sinned by being too successful, but has also been convicted of studying his art from a higher standpoint than the mere professional one, cannot wholly be set down to a mistaken zeal for the public service, or to an extravagant fondness for classic architecture. Besides a general prejudice against good old English Gothic, these gentlemen have set up a howl of especial bitterness against the appointment of perhaps the fittest man in the country, to rebuild one of our crazy government offices on a scale more worthy of our national

greatness. They have used the weight of their own position, and the influence of a minister whose good taste is quite on a level with his art-learning, to hinder the carrying out of Mr. Scott's beautiful designs for a new Foreign Office. In the heat, no doubt, of their patriotic devotion, they have been trying to annul the verdict of a competent committee, and to revoke the pledges given by a former cabinet. It is useless to remind them that Mr. Scott's plan will cost no more than any of its rivals— that Gothic can hardly be out of place in the neighbourhood of Westminster Abbey and the new Houses of Parliament-or that Mr. Scott's windows will let in proportionally more light than those of the Pall-Mall club-houses. They only butt all the harder against evident facts, and harp away the more fondly on objections which have been refuted again and again. If the facts should happen not to tally with their assertions, so much the worse, they seem to say, for the facts.

Under cloak of such high authority, what wonder if people, who have less means of learning the truth, should continue to accept for truth the very fallacies which seem most untenable to candid eyes! The watchword of a party becomes with them a matter of practical belief. All their lives they have been hearing whispered about their own tea-tables, the same sort of pet phrases which have lately been bandied about in noisier tones among the leaders of the anti-Gothic crusade. With such inspiration from above, their floating prejudices must tend to crystallize into a set of formal assertions not the less dangerous for being more open to disproof; it being sometimes easier to conquer a whole kingdom by a timely dash upon the capital, than to drive a small army from a series of weak intrenchments in the open field. That these assertions should be more or less untrue, will matter little to those who find a pleasure in believing whatever chimes in with their habitual notions. The great art, as Mr. Bright would probably say, is to make your statements, and leave others to prove them false. While one of them is getting roughly handled, flourish the next in your opponent's face, and make ready to vamp up the former for after use. Of two parties to a dispute, he who talks loudest, longest, and most fluently, is pretty sure to win readiest favour from the unthinking crowd.

The cant most commonly heard among the opponents of modern Gothic-apart from objections already discussed-may be resolved, like Cerberus, into three heads-of cost, of comeliness, and of comfort. At first glance this threefold monster looks forbidding enough, but it needs no great enchanter to prove its growling worse than its bite. We are continually told that the Gothic style is very costly, because Sir Charles Barry designed his great work after the most florid of all florid patterns, and entailed on the country an outlay far surpassing even the handsome range of his original estimate. It would be just as wise to argue that one man could not dine well for two or three shillings, because another man's dinner costs him a pound. The estimated cost of Mr. Scott's design for the Foreign Office, was only a trifle greater than that of the rival design sent in by Messrs. Banks and Barry. Of the causes which had combined to multiply the cost of our new Parliament houses, few, if any, would be likely to work in the present instance. If in the former building every inch was overlaid with ornament, beautiful in itself, though better suited to a clear southern sky than to the smoke of a misty northern capital, Mr. Scott's ambition is rather to produce great effects by a due arrangement of simple means, and to adapt his style to the special requirements of site, purpose, and economy. Nor is even his great experience needed to prove to any impartial thinker, that Gothic art is not inevitably dearer than French or Italian. "There are hartises and hartises." Gothic art is eminently elastic, and accommodates itself to every depth of pocket as readily as to every mood of mind. If you wish to have a house built strong enough to outlast your children, and care to link your memory with something better than a builder's barbarism, a Gothic architect will furnish you with a scale of charges ranging, like those of a patent moderator, from something as cheap, though not near so ugly, as a modern lodging-house in a respectable street, to an article as costly and quite as grand as the great square hall with its classic portico, where a retired contractor takes his ease on money conjured by a lucky stroke or two out of the pockets of a trusting nation. According to your own taste and needs, you may have your Gothic as bare of ornament as a common cow

house, or as floridly ornate as a Chinese card-case. The price is regulated in this, as well as other things, far less by the difference in size or shape, than by the difference in decorative details. You make your choice, and pay accordingly. Of course it is understood that you wish for a habitable house, not for a flimsy sham. If you are not particular as to the thickness of walls or the soundness of flooring-if you have no costly prejudice against unwholesome plaster, unseasoned woodwork, leaky roofs-against vile smells and killing draughts-awful ugliness without and every form of discomfort within-then, perhaps, your business will be better done by one of those cheap builders who run up rows of rickety houses at the shortest notice, in the neighbourhood of every feasible railway station, or on the skirts of every rising country-town.

But then we are told that Gothic buildings lack comfort, in the full modern meaning of that word. They are not in keeping, it seems, with the refinements of this luxurious age. To many persons the style has got itself hopelessly linked with low odd-shaped rooms, and windy passages, made dismaller by means of oaken paneling, polished floors, and prisonlike windows; not to name the lesser grievances of stiff upright chairs, grim cabinets, and obtrusive chimney-pieces. Drawn perhaps from Carisbrook ruins, the "Castle of Otranto," and Mrs. Radcliffe, their notions of olden Gothic refuse to admit the question of its possible growth into something more consonant with the taste for glare and gilding, for white marble, gay colouring, mirrors, and French-polish, which seems to mark the present stage in our national career. Or, arguing from the known to the unknown, they think that a Gothic building must necessarily have rooms as low as the rooms of some old country-house that called itself a convent several hundred years ago, and as poorly lighted as some modern church, scantily furnished with narrow strips of window after the fashion of a still earlier day. To any one who has paid the least attention to this subject, provided only that his eyes have not lost the power of seeing rightly, such notions must seem intensely absurd. In many an old house, and in more than one old college, the rooms are almost lofty enough to please the larger requirements of our own day. The