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a former case, ocular demonstration. Here is the section.

The case is very simple: the external dome is not the only one; nor the one that supports the lantern. It were almost enough to add,- Who ever said it was? Yet this is written down a case of false construction," a fictitious dome, not the dome of the cathedral, but a mere construction for effect, - a mere imposing show, constructed at vast expense, without any legitimate reason." (P. 9.)

On

Now, it may be slowness of apprehension; it is not, I trust, moral obliquity, if I express a serious doubt as to the grounds of this judicial verdict. what principle is the giving to a metropolitan church an amount of external dignity beyond internal requirements to be put without the pale of all legitimate reasons? How long have Englishmen been, -or when and why should they begin to be,ashamed, that the most conspicuous object that (hitherto, at least) has given notice of their metro

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polis, should be that unrivalled dome which connects the name of London with that of the Apostle of us Gentiles? How long has architecture been under vow of turning ascetic and abjuring "effect?" I might ask, who but a Puritan, a Papist, or an architectural fanatic, can look up at that glorious dome, lifting above the smoke and din of our monstrous capital the golden emblem of man's salvation, and pronounce the words, "fictitious,"-" mere imposing show," and "without a legitimate reason?"

Let us take bigotry in its own trap. If this dome is fictitious, and "not the dome of the cathedral," because there is another dome (seen, though not exclusively, from within) the crime must, of course, be incomparably more flagrant in all the thousand mediæval spires, for whose imitation, as Christian, we are to abjure these "pagan " domes. That magnificent lantern does actually glorify the interior dome: What must be said of gigantic pyramids raised "at vast expense," on lofty towers for no such purpose,constructions so far from being the spires of their respective churches, that they are inaccessible, internally, to the solitary scrutiny of a jackdaw?

But our answer is not complete. Here is another section, (see next page) faithfully reduced, from Britton's "Salisbury."

I wonder who ever thought, before the days of Pugin, of charging Gothic architecture with double dealing, because it gave to Salisbury a double roof? and who would have expected to find Pugin's charge adopted ("Seven Lamps," note 8.), by one who, treating of "Christian architecture," complacently

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calls the inner roof the "roof proper," and the outer one the "roof mask? " *

But here is something else. The leading article speaks of "front and back"-fronts "for show," open to ugly betrayal behind. Well; but look again at that Salisbury section, and you will find there also some "truth," we must call "ugly "on the same principle. The different tints distinguish between the front as it would present itself on the stranger's approach, and the actual building "behind," that front professes to represent. I leave the reader to say how much of this "greatness is got up for show."

Salisbury front may be defective as compared with others, wanting in majesty, grace, or the impress of a pervading thought, it is a fair front notwithstanding; and, what is to our point, a virtuous front, for it is really and truly a frontispiece: it does not

* Stones of Venice, vol. i. chap. xiii.; vol. ii. chap. vi.

content itself with a mere utilitarian terminating of the premises.

The pure legitimacy of all this I will not stop to argue. It is enough that these cases pair off together. Let us have no more sweeping questions of "Christian and Pagan" turning on palpable violations of common justice and common sense.

I cannot leave the leading article without a word of further notice. There is something about columns — "uselessness of Corinthian columns stuck on fronts -on which, though far from dissenting from much that is sound and valuable in the article, I must offer a remark or two. It brings us, in fact, face to face with a true counting-house maxim we are being threatened with. I mean that all employment of columns, save for what on the very straightest principles are for actual use, is wasteful, vicious, and inadmissible. I remember an encomium on a certain work of Sir Charles Barry, that it presented a palatian front without the employment of a single column.*

Now I hesitate not to call this a revolutionary and destructive principle, subversive of everything that makes architecture a fine art; and no less at variance with those great beneficent laws on which the Almighty architect has built the universe.

I will not stop to utilitarianise the column itself.

* The critic might have found a more striking case, and without going far to look for it. We have similarly democratised the metropolitan palace of the Queen of England. I suppose the builder of Buckingham House remembered certain words of Mr. Cobden, as to the "barbaric splendour of royalty."

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It is true that it can scarcely ever be utterly useless. At the lowest calculation it is a virtual buttress, and adds stability: perhaps our modern walls are not too strong. All this, however, I disdain to argue. Once admit the dictatorship of utilitarianism, and you have got to engineering, carpentering, bricklaying: you have done with art.

There is, I know, the implicit phrase of "useful and ornamental." To that phrase, in its common usage, I cannot implicitly subscribe. Between what is simply necessary to human existence, and what is but desirable for its accommodation, there is, of course, an absolute distinction. Between things that, short of being thus necessary, are desirable, there are, of course, distinctions also; but of degree only, and not absolute. If the word "useful" stand for anything short of what is necessary, then its distinction from "the ornamental" is but one of degree also. The absolute contrast is a false contrast. "Useful" means, I suppose, conducive to a proper purpose. If, then, comeliness, befittingness, accordance with the great instinctive sympathies God has made us of — accordance with the great master outlines and indelible emblazonry of his own workmanship, be, as I suppose they are, conducive to a proper purpose (and this is what I mean by ornament · all beside or beyond is but disfigurement), Where can you draw an absolute line between the useful and the ornamental? Who will say that ugliness is not an inconvenience? Or what would be thought of him who, reading "Truly the light is good, and a pleasant thing it is to behold the sun," should straight