Royal Academy exhibitions continue periodically to shew new specimens of it, and the largest and most carefully and learnedly executed Gothic mansion of the present day is not only a castle in name,-it is not a sham fortress, such as those of twenty years back, whose frowning gateway is perhaps flanked on either side with a three-foot clipped hedge, but it is a real and carefully constructed medieval fortress, capable of standing a siege from an Edwardian army,

a bulwark against the inroads of a Llewelyn or a Glendower. No pains or outlay have been grudged to render the fortress impregnable under mediæval conditions, and against an enemy of five centuries back,

"Whose bones are dust and their good swords rust,
Whose souls are with the saints, we trust."

Now this is the very height of masquerading. The learning and skill with which the pageant has been carried out reflect the highest credit upon the architect; yet I cannot but feel it to have been a serious injury to our cause, that so unreal a task should have been imposed upon him; and a misfortune of no ordinary kind that so much knowledge and skill should not have been directed to the adaptation of the noble style in which he was working to the genuine requirements of the nineteenth century.

A justly popular writer on architecture somewhere compares our Gothic revival to the Eglintoun tournament. Had the custom of castle-building been the subject of his attempted parallel, it would have been a very fair one, for the very same scientific discoveries (themselves, by-the-bye, medieval) which have made defensive armour a useless burden, have also done away with the old system of fortification; but till he can point out the mechanical discoveries which have as completely superseded the arch, or have rendered that of the pointed form less beautiful or useful now, than

Let us earnestly hope, then, that the use of castles having long since gone by, people will henceforth be contented to live in houses.

The danger, however, of masquerading is not confined to these obvious and palpable fallacies: among those who best understand medieval art there is a danger of ultra-mediævalism in minor things, which often involves a good deal of the same spirit. The adoption of features whose uses are obsolete; the denying ourselves the use of such as are of modern introduction; the use of modes of decoration inconsistent with the habits of the age; indeed, everything which would make one feel that we are living in a house belonging essentially to a previous age, rather than our own, has a smacking more or less of architectural masquerade.

We do not wish to adapt ourselves to medieval customs, but to adapt a style of art which accidentally was medieval, but is essentially national, to the wants and requirements of our own day. This, however, is a point to which I shall have to return presently.

The second drawback to our success has been our want of unity of purpose in point of style.

It may be considered an axiom in architecture, though one which the world is most loath to admit, that a style which is well fitted for one class of build

formerly; which have caused Greek or Roman mouldings to be more suited to us than those designed by our own forefathers; or which have rendered the foliage from the shores of the Mediterranean a more appropriate decoration for English buildings than that which flourishes around us, or heathen mythology more suitable to our sculpture than Scripture history or that of our own country, the parallel cannot go a step beyond the condemnation of such practices as those I am now exposing.

ings ought (if it is good for anything) to be equally well suited to others.

Many who sincerely approve of our movement so far as it applies to church architecture, think it should stop there; or in other words, that pointed architecture should be only our sacred language in art. Others, again, take an intermediate course, and adopt the Elizabethan for their houses, on the ground that while its leading forms sufficiently assimilate with those of our church architecture, house-building was better understood in the sixteenth century than in the fourteenth, while the converse was the case with church architecture.

Others, again, are willing to go a step further, and take the Tudor style for their domestic type, as the most perfect adaptation of purely pointed architecture to domestic uses.

None of these theories will, however, bear a scrutiny.

Unity of style is essential to consistency. We must select the style which in itself is the best, and has the strongest claims upon our sympathy, and for its proper use we must depend upon ourselves.

In church architecture, we have so generally comé to the conclusion that the best period of our national architecture was the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries, that we have insensibly adopted that as the groundwork of our revival.

We did not select this period because the bestarranged churches were then erected, (for it may, I think, be proved that such are oftener to be found of a later date,) but simply because the architecture was then at its highest perfection; for the shape and ar

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rangement of our churches we trust to ourselves, and to the dictates of our own requirements. Now, this is precisely what we ought to do by secular architecture. Let us take the same style for our groundwork, and be guided solely by our own requirements in the use of it. Whatever is to be learned from the Tudor or Elizabethan, which is worth learning, may readily be translated back into the higher style of art. If we cannot do this, we are unfit to work in any style.

It may, perhaps, be objected, that while we have abundant material from which to revive the church architecture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, such is far from being the case with the domestic remains of that period. These are so scarce as to be almost architectural rarities, while the domestic works of the fifteenth and sixteenth century are everywhere abundant. This, it is true, is a drawback in several ways, yet it is not an unmitigated evil. It increases the difficulties of the architect by reducing his stock of precedents, and it renders his work less familiar to the mind of the ordinary observer, by its want of similarity to the more well-known types; but, on the other hand, it leaves more to the imagination and inventive powers of the architect, and leaves him more unfettered by precedent to strike out freely such developments as the practical conditions prescribed to him may suggest.

The existing types, however, of the period in question, though not so abundant as to be familiar, are sufficiently so to remove all difficulty in learning the style, and are so manifestly superior in point of beauty to those of later periods, as to leave no question in the minds of those who are acquainted with them as to their comparative merits; while such is the unity

of principle throughout the whole range of pointed architecture, that there is no kind of difficulty in translating any idea we learn from works of its later stages back into the purer taste of its earlier days; a process which adds novelty and freshness to familiar types. I do not advocate any extreme carefulness in ascertaining whether the features thus arrived at were actually ever used in the fourteenth century: this really does not in the least concern us; our business being simply to cull from works of any date, or from our own conceptions, such ideas as are practically suited to meet our requirements, and to express them consistently with the feeling of the style in which we are working; and if the result should differ from anything before done, so much the better, if only it be good.

This brings me to the third of the causes which have hitherto impeded our success,-our want of boldness in adapting our architecture to our requirements, and thus making it thoroughly our own.

This point has been in a great degree anticipated by what has been said under the former heads; but as it in fact embraces the whole question, we must consider it more in detail.

Architecture differs from her sister arts of painting and sculpture in this, that while they directly originate from a feeling for beauty, and are either wholly independent of utility, or only accidentally connected with it, architecture results in the first instance from necessity, beauty being a superadded grace.

The element of beauty may increase in its relative importance with the nature and objects of the building, in proportion (to use a modern phrase) as the building becomes more monumental in its character; but in no class of building can beauty be consistently