VII. GOTHIC PALACES 313

last for ages; but only in the Gothic is it possible to give security and dignity to work wrought with imperfect means and materials. And I trust that there will come a time when the English people may see the folly of building basely and insecurely. It is common with those architects against whose practice my writings have hitherto been directed, to call them merely theoretical and imaginative. I answer, that there is not a single principle asserted either in the Seven Lamps or here, but is of the simplest, sternest veracity, and the easiest practicability: that buildings, raised as I would have them, would stand unshaken for a thousand years; and the buildings raised by the architects who oppose them will not stand for one hundred and fifty, they sometimes do not stand for an hour. There is hardly a week passes without some catastrophe brought about by the base principles of modern building: some vaultless floor that drops the staggering crowd through the jagged rents of its rotten timbers; some baseless bridge that is washed away by the first wave of a summer flood; some fungous wall of nascent rottenness that a thunder-shower soaks down with its workmen into a heap of slime and death.* These we hear of, day by day; yet these indicate but the thousandth part of the evil. The portion of the national income sacrificed in mere bad building, in the perpetual repairs and swift condemnation and pulling down of ill-built shells of houses, passes all calculation. And the weight of the penalty is not yet felt; it will tell upon our children some fifty years hence when the cheap work, and contract work, and stucco and

* “On Thursday, the 20th, the front walls of two of the new houses now building in Victoria Street, Westminster, fell to the ground. ... The roof was on, and a massive compo cornice was put up at top, as well as dressings to the upper windows. The roof is formed by girders and 4½ brick arches in cement, covered with asphalte to form a flat. The failure is attributed to the quantity of rain which has fallen. Others suppose that some of the girders were defective, and gave way, carrying the walls with them.”-Builder, for January 29th, 1853. The rest of this volume might be filled with such notices, if we sought for them.¹

¹ [See above, p. 94, for the report of another accident of the kind.]

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