of elegance. It was the business of the architect to contrive some means by which that which was conducive to strength might also be conducive to beauty; and any one who has looked at the fine play of light and shadow produced by the range of the deep buttresses along the side of King's College Chapel at Cambridge, and who carries his eye from the broad base through the several stages up the richly crocketted pinnacle, must feel that had there been no necessity for buttresses, the chapel would have wanted most of its external beauty.

I have been led to mention a very well known and generally admired perpendicular building, merely to illustrate the general principle, that the glory of an architect consists, not in concealing any of the elementary portions of his building, but in exhibiting them in a form that will be beautiful, or at any rate in one that will not be offensive. It was by no means my purpose to undertake the defence of the Perpendicular style against its able and numerous enemies; nor would I dissemble my conviction, that it is a depravation of the Pointed style. Still it has beauties, and has been, I think, unfairly treated, even in respect to the relation between exterior and interior, to which I have just adverted.

A very eloquent and popular writer upon æsthetic subjects remarks, I think (for I have not his book to refer to), that the solidity, width, and flatness of the stone roof, with the absence of columns, or any visible means of support in King's College Chapel, produced a painful impression. Now, it is an important element in the case, that no one is ever in the inside of a building, who has not been previously on the outside of it; and no one can have been on the outside of King's College Chapel, without noticing the massive strength of the buttresses, so foreign to the general effeminacy of the Perpendicular style. The question is sug

gested to his mind, for what purpose have these vast masses of masonry been erected? As soon as he enters and raises his eyes to the roof, sees its form, and understands that it is no deceptive compound of lath and plaster, then instead of having any difficulty suggested to his mind, he finds at once the solution of a previously existing difficulty -he finds that the buttresses which he felt to be beautiful, but of which he could not see the use, were what was necessary, and not more than was necessary, for the stability of the fabric.

It may not be foreign to these remarks upon truthfulness, and its kindred virtue consistency, to observe, that while the arts of painting and architecture may have many common principles, a picture and a building are very different things. A picture is intended merely to be looked at, and that only in front. A building—that is to say, any thing that has employed the thoughts of an architectany thing above an ordinary dwelling-house or a manufactory -is indeed intended to be looked at; but that is not its sole purpose, nay, it is not even its primary purpose. Its primary purpose is to shelter and accommodate human beings, either permanently as a residence, or occasionally as a place for public meetings. Now, in any work of art, a secondary purpose ought to be kept subservient to and consistent with the primary purpose; and it follows, that any edifice which exhibits on its façade elements, however beautiful, which have no connection with the interior structure, nor consequently with the primary purpose of the edifice, is worthy of all condemnation. I think there is a Scottish church in Regent Square, London, which exhibits this defect very strongly. Its front is an ambitious imitation of York Minster, with rich flanking towers, and a gable containing the great west window between them. There is

here the promise of a nave and side aisles, of piers, arches, and clerestory; but, without going inside, every spectator who turns the flank, sees at once that the interior affords nothing of the kind—that it is merely a large room, very well suited for its real purpose as an auditorium or place for hearing sermons, but with no more affinity to the architectural features of its own façade, than it has to the architecture of any club-house or any theatre in London. Instances of this kind are to be found in all our large towns. They throw no suspicion upon the skill or taste of the architect; he was merely asked to give a design for a pretty mask, and he gave it. But it may be worthy of the consideration of the professional members of the Institute, whether they could not do something towards checking the demands for such incongruous and deceptive edifices.

The difficulty lies here. All churches and sects among us, seem agreed that their places of worship ought to be in some mode of the Pointed style. In all the good old examples of that style, the arrangement of the eastern and western extremities is felt to be very beautiful, while the internal arrangements are found to be inconvenient for our purposes, differing as they do from the purposes contemplated by those who built those ancient models. It is very natural then, that committees should seek to purchase the external beauty without the internal inconvenience, and that thus they should insist upon the erection of the incongruous buildings I have alluded to. They will probably continue to do so until one of two things happen-either that our architects should discover some means by which beauty of external form and arrangement in the Pointed style may be made consistent with the internal arrangements required by our Protestant forms of worship, or

failing this, that we should come to the conclusion, that the Pointed style is altogether to be excluded as unsuitable to the purpose for which churches are now built.

Now I suppose there is not a member of this Society, who would not consider the adoption of the latter alternative as a national disgrace and misfortune; but I see not how it is to be avoided, unless our architects should succeed in solving the problem contained in the former alternative. Of the facility or even possibility of doing this, I feel that I am incompetent to speak. But there are considerations which prevent me from despairing, and principally, that the Pointed style is governed by great principles rather than by strict laws; and that, in consequence, it affords great scope for variety, both as to ground-plan, elevation, and internal arrangement.

First, we have the little Country Church, with its low walls, high pitched roof, its well proportioned chancel, its humble south porch, and little bell-cote surmounting the western gable; then there is the Chapel form, the single rectangle, without either tower, side aisles, or chancel, as exhibited in the chapel of King's College, Cambridge, New College, Oxford, and the very beautiful Trinity Chapel attached to Ely Cathedral; thirdly, there is the larger Parish Church, generally with a western tower or spire, with side aisles, and clerestory, a chancel and porch; and lastly, there is a form very different from all these, the polygonal Chapter-house, of which there are good specimens in many of the English Cathedrals, and I think at Elgin.

Here are four very different classes of building, all of them in use during the prevalence of the Pointed style, and the adaptation of that style to all of them seems to have caused no difficulty to the architects of those times. Now I see no reason to believe, that the possible

adaptations of Pointed Architecture are limited to these four forms; indeed, I see already that I have omitted the grandest form, that of the Cruciform Church or perfect Cathedral, If, therefore, an architect is called upon to produce a plan for a church, to contain say a thousand sitters, and in the Pointed style, he is not confined by the rules of his art to any one form-nay, he may produce a form absolutely new, provided it be consistent with the principles of the style which he adopts. In the communion to which I belong, most of our new churches are in the simple, and a few in the more extended, parish church form. For our smaller country congregations, the former of these is seemly and convenient-they would probably not suit so well for denominations more populous than ours. The latter, which is perhaps the handsomest form in which Pointed Architecture can be applied, is exposed to two grave objections. In the first place, the piers between the nave and side aisles, separate, as to seeing and hearing, a considerable portion of the congregation from the officiating minister, and the consequence is, that many seats are condemned as useless. In the second place, as the supply of money is seldom commensurate with the desire for architectural display, the architect is compelled to economize his space, to erect galleries which never did and never can harmonize with the lines of a Pointed building, and which render the piers not indeed constructively but pictorially useless. The desideratum then is, to discover the best way in which the old styles of ecclesiastical architecture may be modified so as to meet our modern requirements. It would be very rash at once to begin such experiments in stone, but I should wish to see some qualified architect, deeply impressed with veneration for the old forms, but at the same time sensible to the inconvenience attend