58 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

for you will find it runs directly in front of all the garret windows, thus interfering with their light, and blocking out their view of the street. All that the parapet is meant to do, is to give some finish to the façades, and the inhabitants have thus been made to pay a large sum for a piece of mere decoration. Whether it does finish the façades satisfactorily, or whether the physicians resident in the street, or their patients, are in anywise edified by the succession of pear-shaped knobs of stone on their house-tops, I leave them to tell you; only do not fancy that the design, whatever its success, is an economical one.

35. But this is a very slight waste of money, compared to the constant habit of putting careful sculpture at the tops of houses. A temple of luxury has just been built in London for the Army and Navy Club.¹ It cost £40,000, exclusive of purchase of ground. It has upon it an enormous quantity of sculpture, representing the gentlemen of the navy as little boys riding upon dolphins, and the gentlemen of the army-I couldn’t see as what-nor can anybody; for all this sculpture is put up at the top of the house, where the gutter should be, under the cornice. I know that this was a Greek way of doing things. I can’t help it; that does not make it a wise one. Greeks might be willing to pay for what they couldn’t see, but Scotchmen and Englishmen shouldn’t.

36. Not that the Greeks threw their work away as we do. As far as I know Greek buildings, their ornamentation, though often bad, is always bold enough and large enough to be visible in its place. It is not putting ornament high that is wrong; but it is cutting it too fine to be seen, wherever it is. This is the great modern mistake: you are actually at twice the cost which would produce an

¹ [This club-house, built on the site of what was once Nell Gwynne’s house, was erected in the years 1846-1851, from the designs of a young Oxford architect, named Parnell. The total cost, inclusive of side and furniture, was £116,000. It is, say its admirers, “a happy combination of Sansovino’s Palazzo Cornaro and St. Mark’s Library at Venice” (see A. I. Dasent’s History of St. James’s Square, 1895, p. 187 n.). For another reference to it, see Vol. IX. p. 348 n.]

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