I. ARCHITECTURE 47

built as many of them as there are slates on your houseroofs, you will never care for them. They will only remain to later ages as monuments of the patience and pliability with which the people of the nineteenth century sacrificed their feelings to fashions, and their intellects to forms. But on the other hand, that strange and thrilling interest with which such words strike you as are in any wise connected with Gothic architecture-as for instance, Vault, Arch, Spire, Pinnacle, Battlement, Barbican,¹ Porch, and myriads of such others, words everlastingly poetical and powerful whenever they occur,-is a most true and certain index that the things themselves are delightful to you, and will ever continue to be so. Believe me, you do indeed love these things, so far as you care about art at all, so far as you are not ashamed to confess what you feel about them.

24. In your public capacities, as bank directors, and charity overseers, and administrators of this and that other undertaking or institution, you cannot express your feelings at all. You form committees to decide upon the style of the new building, and as you have never been in the habit of trusting to your own taste in such matters, you inquire who is the most celebrated, that is to say, the most employed, architect of the day. And you send for the great Mr. Blank, and the Great Blank sends you a plan of a great long marble box with half-a-dozen pillars at one end of it, and the same at the other;² and you look at the Great Blank’s great plan in a grave manner, and you daresay it will be very handsome; and you ask the Great Blank what sort of a blank cheque must be filled up before the great plan can be realised; and you subscribe in a generous “burst

¹ [In the city of London “is a street called the Barbican, because sometime there stood on the north side thereof a burgh-kenin, or watch-tower of the city, called in some language a Barbican, as a bikening is called a Beacon” (Stow’s Survey, p. 113). So the word is used in the Faërie Queene, ii. 9, 25:-

“Within the Barbican a Porter sate,

Day and night duely keeping watch and ward.”]

² [This seems to refer to the Royal Institution in Edinburgh, an oblong building in the Doric style: see below, pp. 64-65 n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]