428 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

some conformity with the “handsome fronts” of the hotels and offices on the quay.

Hotels and offices, and “handsome fronts” in general-they can be built in America or Australia-built at any moment, and in any height of splendour. But who shall give us back, when once destroyed, the habitations of the French chivalry and bourgeoisie, in the days of the Field of the Cloth of Gold?

15. It is strange that no one seems to think of this! What do men travel for, in this Europe of ours? Is it only to gamble with French dies¹-to drink coffee out of French porcelain-to dance to the beat of German drums, and sleep in the soft air of Italy? Are the ball-room, the billiard-room, and the Boulevard, the only attractions that win us into wandering, or tempt us to repose? And when the time is come, as come it will, and that shortly, when the parsimony-or lassitude-which, for the most part, are the only protectors of the remnants of elder time, shall be scattered by the advance of civilization-when all the monuments, preserved only because it was too costly to destroy them, shall have been crushed by the energies of the new world, will the proud nations of the twentieth century, looking round on the plains of Europe, disencumbered of their memorial marbles,-will those nations indeed stand up with no other feeling than one of triumph, freed from the paralysis of precedent and the entanglement of memory, to thank us, the fathers of progress, that no saddening shadows can any more trouble the enjoyments of the future,-no moments of reflection retard its activities; and that the new-born population of a world without a record and without a ruin may, in the fulness of ephemeral felicity, dispose itself to eat, and to drink, and to die?

16. Is this verily the end at which we aim, and will the mission of the age have been then only accomplished, when the last castle has fallen from our rocks, the last cloisters

¹ [So written by Ruskin for “dice,” the more usual form of the plural in this sense.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]