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Don't "knock away," then, the "pinnacles of King's College Chapel." Put the chapel on the pinnacles, not the pinnacles on the chapel. "Beasts have legs." Yes; but Where do you see beasts with their legs up in the air?

Block up the great west window in those "fine fronts." Animals have heads with "horns subordinated." Yes; and eyes too; but Where was ever one great eye between the horns?

Away, also, with all windows, civil, military, or ecclesiastical, on the ground floor. Where was ever a decent beast with eye in its sides, or its basement story? Put your door also in the upper regions. The door is the mouth: Was it not the very condemnation of the serpent that it should have its mouth on the ground and lick the dust?

But what mean you by that straight roof? Beasts have dorsal ridges. Yes; but What beast did you ever see, horse, ass, ox, camel, dromedary, crocodile, porpoise, with such a ridge as men called architects have contrived to hit on?

Away also with all those straight columns. Show me a straight leg in comparative anatomy. Stag, stork, dog, hog, dragon-fly, -all have joints more or less visible; even

"The elephant hath joints, though not for courtesy."

And, touching columns, remember that all your noblest buildings have but two. Man is the first of animals, and he is biped. The ignoble are centipedes, caterpillars, and such like. Away, therefore, with

some nineteen-twentieths of those unseemly columns from the Parthenon.

And, not to ride a principle to death, having brought down the columns to nature, take away the whole of the entablature. It is worse than frightful,

it is wicked. Nature has horizontal strata, no doubt; but where do you find stratified animals' legs, or stratified trunks of trees?

I owe no apology for these instances. They are all, seminally, in the "Novum Organum." The author betrays no scruples. He says, "I know this is heresy; but I never shrink from any conclusion, however contrary to human authority, to which I am led by the observance of natural objects.” (Ibid. p. 127.) And here is a Westminster Reviewer, ready to hail all" special merit of recalling to manliness, veracity, and morality, what has been too long given over to dilettantism and conventionalism."

We are very far, even yet, from the proper limits of the principle. If anatomy is to furnish architecture with absolute laws, we might fill a chapter with examples of things heretofore condemned for want of grace, of which it were enough to produce the "apologetic type," to convert them at once to positive comeliness. Certain is it that "Nature's sweetest child" must have committed a grave offence, when he dared to call "the toad ugly and venomous.

Indeed, I know not how we can limit the analogy to mere questions of beauty, or the want of it. If, short of creative arrangement, nothing is symmetrical, nothing legitimate, and all we have

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dared to call "architecture" is amongst man's " many inventions," why not fall reverently back on that of animals? Don't palter, then, with great principles. Make all your practice consistent. Knock away, not a college pinnacle, or a wretched portcullis, but the whole array of man's presumption,

Gothic, Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and what not, -and group your way, in penitential self-denial, amongst beavers' huts, birds' nests, and spiders' webs. This may sound extreme: I find no measures in Pre-Raffaellitism. It is all in one text, " apologetic

ARCHITECTURE," IN THE LIGHT OF CONSEQUENCES.

WE are told, that it is the object of one of Mr. Ruskin's most earnest, elaborate, eloquent, and popular works, to

"determine" [for every architectural effort] “constant, general, and irrefragable laws of right" - to "command an honest architecture." We are warned, with all possible solemnity, of the criminality of "the suggesting of a mode of structure other than the true one; " that "that style of building is generally the noblest which discovers to the intelligent eye the great secrets of its structure; that one of the immoralities of architecture is "direct falsity of assertion respecting the nature of material;" that “the moment iron, for instance, in the least degree takes the place of stone, or if it be used to do what wooden beams would have done as well, that instant the building ceases to be true architecture;" that "the system of intersectional mouldings has been the cause of the downfall of Gothic architecture." The "Lamp" concentrates its rays in the general exhortation, "Do not let us lie at all." (Seven Lamps, Lamp of Truth.)

We have here, I presume, a signal specimen of what the Westminster critic calls "restoring to manliness, veracity, and morality." I trace it beyond critical reviews. It has found its way into profes

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sional treatises, and even leading articles of "the leading journal."

I wonder not: it sounds too straightforward not to produce an effect. I shall be no less straightforward in asking a question or two concerning it. Will it bear the test? Is it the expression of sound architectural good sense? or must we class it with Puritanism, Fanaticism, Quakerism, Radicalism? I shall not shrink from the question on the ground of principles; but I shall not scruple to put it first on that of consequences.

We may begin with another sentence, which, though not from the same "Lamp," is the utterance of the same authority :

"The feeling of the Renaissance is a feeling compounded of insolence, infidelity, sensuality, and shallow pride." (Pre-Raphaelitism, p. 27.)

There can be no possible doubt of the result of such a sentence, on all "constant, general, and irrefragable laws of right." We find, in fact, that in a later work, this style is "accursed of deliberate purpose: (Edin. Lect. p. 137.) We may say, then, without a moment's hesitation, there go, at one dire sweep, the Brunelleschis, Bramantes, Michael Angelos, Sansovinos, San Micheles, San Gallos, Scamozzis, Fontanas, Palladios, of Italy; the Holbeins of Germany; the Perraults of France; the Inigo Joneses, Christopher Wrens, Vanbrughs, and Chamberses of England; in short, all the great and noble architectural names of at least three centuries; together with all artistic impulses, synchronical-to say no more with the Reformation.

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