22 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

great church with the dome, at the end of George Street.¹ I think I never saw a building with a principal entrance so utterly ghastly and oppressive; and it is as weak as it is ghastly. The huge horizontal lintel above the door is already split right through. But you are not aware of a thousandth part of the evil: the pieces of building that you see are all carefully done; it is in the parts that are to be concealed by paint and plaster that the bad building of the day is thoroughly committed. The main mischief lies in the strange devices that are used to support the long horizontal cross beams of our larger apartments and shops, and the framework of unseen walls; girders and ties of cast iron, and props and wedges, and laths nailed and bolted together, on marvellously scientific principles; so scientific, that every now and then, when some tender reparation is undertaken by the unconscious householder, the whole house crashes into a heap of ruin, so total, that the jury which sits on the bodies of the inhabitants cannot tell what has been the matter with it, and returns a dim verdict of accidental death.²

¹ [St. George’s Established Church at the Charlotte Square end of George Street, completed in 1814 from the design of Robert Reid at a cost of £33,000. The entrance consists of a flight of steps leading up to a portico 35 feet high. The dome is 48 feet across and is surmounted by a cross, the height to the top of which is 160 feet.]

² [In the MS.-and possibly in the lecture as delivered-this passage was more elaborated, and was illustrated by sketches:-

“The other day I was watching the erection of some houses for shops in a suburb of London-shops that were to make an impression on the neighbourhood, and to have large plate-glass in their windows, and magnificent Greek cornices above them. Now, how do you suppose those shops and the houses above them were built? ... There were first small square pillars of brick built up to the height of the shop of as bad bricks as could be got for money; and on the top of these pillars was laid a single flat paving-stone ... [reference to sketch], and then from pillars was laid a cross beam, but economy was so strictly studied in this matter that the shortest beams were chosen which could possibly answer the purpose; so short that, being laid from pillar to pillar, the hold here which they had upon the flat stone was literally not more than two inches-hardly perceptible to the eye at a little distance ... [reference to another sketch]. Now, observe, above these beams was to come the grand Greek cornice-a little bit of the sublime five orders-in stucco; accordingly, here the bricks were not to be seen, and both the bricks and brickwork were as bad as they could be possibly ... Then, above this row of bad brickwork were laid some more flat stones, about two inches thick, to be covered with plaster, and form a sort of

[Version 0.04: March 2008]