OPENING OF THE CRYSTAL PALACE 427

and theatres rise upon the dust of desecrated chapels, and thrust into darkness the humility of domestic life. And when the formal street, in all its pride of perfumery and confectionery, has successfully consumed its way through wrecks of historical monuments, and consummated its symmetry in the ruin of all that once prompted a reflection, or pleaded for regard, the whitened city is praised for its splendour, and the exulting inhabitants for their patriotism-patriotism which consists in insulting their fathers with forgetfulness, and surrounding their children with temptation.

14. I am far from intending my words to involve any disrespectful allusion to the very noble improvements in the city of Paris itself, lately carried out under the encouragement of the Emperor. Paris, in its own peculiar character of bright magnificence, had nothing to fear, and everything to gain, from the gorgeous prolongations of the Rue Rivoli.¹ But I speak of the general influence of the rich travellers and proprietors of Europe on the cities which they pretend to admire, or endeavour to improve. I speak of the changes wrought during my own lifetime on the cities of Venice, Florence, Geneva, Lucerne, and chief of all on Rouen,² a city altogether inestimable for its retention of mediæval character in the infinitely varied streets in which one half of the existing and inhabited houses date from the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and the only town left in France in which the effect of old French domestic architecture can yet be seen in its collective groups. But when I was there, this last spring,³ I heard that these noble old Norman houses are all, as speedily as may be, to be stripped of the dark slates which protected their timbers, and deliberately whitewashed over all their sculptures and ornaments, in order to bring the interior of the town into

¹ [See Stones of Venice, vol. i. (Vol. IX. p. 257).]

² [Compare the summary of such changes up to 1845 given by Ruskin in Modern Painters, vol. ii. (Vol. IV. pp. 37-41); and for a description of the old Rouen, the Essay on Prout, above, p. 310.]

³ [Ruskin visited some of the French towns on his way to Switzerland in the spring of 1854 (see Introduction to Vol. V.).]

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