INTRODUCTION lxiii

with (Aratra Pentelici, §§ 53, 54; and On the Old Road, 1899, vol. ii. § 195). It was to this same point that his pamphlet on The Opening of the Crystal Palace was primarily directed (p. 419); but the event suggested further thoughts on a subject which had for some years past been much in his mind. While the British public was congratulating itself on having achieved, in its halls of glass, “an entirely novel order of architecture,” the old architecture of the world was perishing every day by fire, war, revolution, and neglect; and by a foe, even more destructive than any of these-namely, “restoration.” This is the main theme of the pamphlet, which thus carries a stage further the plea for the preservation of ancient buildings already advanced in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and repeated in scattered passages of later writings. The pamphlet should especially be compared with the chapter on “The Lamp of Memory” in the earlier work (Vol. VIII. pp. 242-247); but here Ruskin adds a practical suggestion. “An association,” he says, “might be formed, thoroughly organised so as to maintain active watchers and agents in every town of importance, who, in the first place, should furnish the society with a perfect account of every monument of interest in its neighbourhood, and then with a yearly or half-yearly report of the state of such monuments, and of the changes proposed to be made upon them” (p. 431). The reader will see from this passage, and the further suggestions which follow it, that Ruskin’s scheme was precisely that which William Morris carried out twenty-three years later in the formation of “The Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings”-a title altered by Morris for popular usage into “The Anti-Scrape.”¹ Of this Society both Ruskin and Carlyle were original members. With the Society’s efforts in connexion with Venice, we shall be concerned in a later volume including St. Mark’s Rest. In the meanwhile Ruskin’s appeals must have confirmed and encouraged other individuals who were working on the same lines, and he himself was ever ready to intervene in particular cases; of such intervention, the volume containing The Arrows of the Chance bears record.

The pamphlet is of further interest as containing-like most of Ruskin’s writings on architecture-an incidental passage which is eloquent of his strong and growing social sympathies. In this passage (§ 18, p. 430), he describes the “few feet of ground (how few !) which

¹Mr. Mackail says in The Life of William Morris (i. 339), that until Morris moved no “clear statement of principle” had been enunciated in the matter. To Ruskin belongs the credit of the suggestion; to Morris, that of embodying it in an organised shape. Ruskin suggested, further, that the Association should in cases of need save ancient monuments from destruction by purchase-an object partly aimed at by the recently formed “National Trust.”

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