to another fancy-the entire antipodes of his earlier predilections: he went to sea.

It is to be presumed the young hero had filled his youthful purse sufficiently to be able to afford the whim which now carried him capriciously out of his vocation. He went to sea, possessed himself first of a pleasure-boat, then of a smack, lastly of a schooner, with which he cruised about the stormy Channel, carrying cargoes of eggs, gathering archæological curiosities where he could, not with too much scrupulousness or nicety as to the means, on the French and Belgian coasts, and pondering to the accompaniment of those familiar waves, within sound of which most of his life was to be passed, the stormy doings of his future life. The despair of his precise and gentlemanly parent may, as the newspapers say, be better imagined than described. "Few things," says Mr Ferrey, with the gravest unconscious oddity of expression, "could have so severely shocked the finely-poised susceptibilities of the elder Pugin." "God bless my soul!" exclaimed this distressed father, suddenly meeting a sympathetic friend, "it was but this morning I met my boy Auguste in the disguise of a common sailor, carrying on his shoulder a tub of water which he had took from the pomp of St Dunstan !" Here was certainly a son "foredoomed his parents' souls to cross." What the opinion of his strongminded mother was on the subject, we are not informed. But Auguste's biographer describes the immediate effect upon the manners and appearance of his hero in a curious and original sentence, constructed upon architectural and not grammatical principles, which we should be sorry not to convey entire to the enlightened reader. It may be naturally inferred," remarks our author, "that from the refined boy and polished gentleman, which were Welby Pugin's characteristics while under his parents' care, his present life had led him to assume the dress

66

and habits of a sailor, with the exception of his innate horror of tobacco and beer." With this important exception, he retained that dress and habits throughout his life, bringing himself and his friends often into awkward positions enough in consequence. While at the height of this fancy and of his relatives' despair, the young mariner managed to wreck his craft on the Scotch coast, and to owe the rescue of his penniless crew to an Edinburgh architect, Mr Gillespie Graham, who gave him the best of advice, and sent back the boy-captain into civilisation and art. This whim, too, had its day and served its purpose, but left likings and inclinations which, in the wonderfully different class of labours about to occupy him, never forsook the exuberant energetic soul. He had exhausted this mood of his youth when the prudent Scottish architect caught him at the turn, and sent the prodigal home. By this time he must have been felt to have graduated in all the recognised forms of mischief by which wayward sons break the hearts of indulgent parents. The last height of independence and waywardness was, however, attained when, after coming home, and dashing with hot haste into a business enterprise, very successful so far as art was concerned, but an entire failure in the important question of profit, the youth, at the age of nineteen, married and took home his bride to the troubled house in Bloomsbury, which could not approve, but dared not reject, this addition to the family. The business in which he had engaged was a shadow of the gigantic undertakings afterwards to flourish under his restless superintendence-a manufactory of carved work and Gothic decorative "detail" of every kind, to execute which the young designer trained and collected a staff of art workmen, those least manageable and most unsatisfactory of all operatives. Naturally, though he could teach, he could not control nor keep steadily at work these slippery and

insubordinate labourers; and this experiment came to an end dolefully, in loss and almost ruin, about the same time as his hapless essay at married life ended in premature death and grief. The boy, sobered at last by a stroke so unexpected, was left at twenty a father and a widower; and, threatened with early ruin, and steadied by early suffering, henceforward departed no more from the occupation of his life. His mother, taking in the most singular simple way his own estimate of his standing-ground, and calculating upon his precocity as upon established manhood, writes of him at this period of his life words which few mothers would be disposed to use of a youth of twenty. "I frequently think," says Mrs Pugin, "how often he used (before he was fourteen years of age) to say, 'My own dear mother, how happy I am! nobody can be happier than I!' Alas, alas! look over the six years which have passed since that period, and we find a whole life of woe, such as is rarely experienced by the generality of men, huddled into it. From his works and his woes he has already experienced a long life; and when he dies, he will not die without some dignity, and have his name perpetuated." Some men are skilful in antedating their lives; Pugin clearly snatched five years at least from the happier side of his, and wrung its youthful days into the fiery web which, according to the ordinary estimate of life, was but half wrought out at its termination. But mortal existence has to be calculated otherwise than by years. He whose works and woes can be reckoned at twenty, and who by that time has come under one of the hardest disadvantages to be encountered in the life-struggle, is not to be estimated by the mere number of his days.

After this melancholy pause in his youthful career, the young man addressed himself more gravely to the profession for which he had been educated, and with which he

VOL. XC.-NO. DLIV.

had coquetted during the wild and eventful boyhood now concluded. He seems to have leapt into architectural practice all at once, as soon. as he chose to devote himself seriously to his work, his name and promise and auxiliary labours being well known. One of the first steps in his progress was the erection of a preposterous mediæval house for his own occupancy, in which all the rooms communicated with each other without any other mode of entrance, and which does not seem to have made up in beauty for its defects in comfort. This extraordinary erection was called by the scarcely less preposterous name of St Marie's Grange; and was speedily occupied by a new wife and flourishing nursery, as well as by the archæological museum for which it was primarily designed. From this centre the young architect, plunging into work with all the haste and impatience of his nature, began at the same time to make angry excursions among the English cathedrals, then deplorably neglected, or still more deplorably patched under pretence of restoration. His Protestant faith had been unsettled long before-very naturally, as Mr Ferrey seems to think-by miserably ugly building in Cross Street, Hatton Garden," where his mother was in the habit of leading him. To expect that "such a youth would submit to be pent up for hours together without any relief, in a pew like a cattle-pen," without damage to his principles, is mere madness to the architectural mind. The natural result followed; and what had been begun by Edward Irving's crowded chapel was completed by the dread neglect, or restoration still more heartrending, of Hereford, Bristol, and Ely, from which places the enraged architect writes furious letters to his friends, tearing his hair the while, and seeing no refuge but in Rome. The style of these invectives, and the kind of emotions excited in artistic minds by churchwardens' Gothic and the parsimony of deans and chapters,

27

"the

may be faintly perceived by the following extracts :—

"Common brick houses, dull shops, and empty streets are the features of Hereford. Maddened by the sight, I rushed to the Cathedral; but, horror! dismay the villain Wyatt had been there; the west front was his. Need I say more? No! All that is vile, cunning, and rascally is included in the term Wyatt, and I could hardly summon sufficient fortitude to enter and examine the interior. In this church there is

much to admire, a good deal to learn, and most to deplore. What do you think of a regular Roman altarscreen, a modern window over it, with the Last Supper' from West like a great transparency? What do you think of it?" said a canon, triumphantly, when he showed it me. Think of it?' said I; why, I think it is yet more execrable than the window of New College Chapel.' The canon was dumb.

All these things raise emotions in the breast of the real antiquarian not easily subdued." "At Malvern the church itself is in dreadful repair: fall it must, and all that is to be hoped is that in its fall it may annihilate those whose duty it was to have restored it.

On proceeding to the cathedral (Lichfield), which, from its distant appearance, promised great things, what was my horror and astonishment on perceiving the west front to have been restored with brown cement, cracked in every direction, with heads worked with the trowel, devoid of all expression or feeling, crockets as bad, and a mixture of all styles. My surprise, however, ceased on the verger's informing me that the whole church was improved and beautified about thirty years ago by the late Mr Wyatt. Yes, this monster of architectural depravity- this pest of cathedral architecture-has been here: need I say more? I wound myself up to the pitch to bear the sight of the havoc he had committed.

Of course,

here his old trick of throwing the Lady Chapel into the choir by pulling down the altar-screen; then he has pewed the choir, and walled up the arches of the choir, making the aisles nothing but dark passages. The man, I am sorry to say, who executed the repairs of the building, was a pupil of the wretch himself, and has imbibed all the vicious propensities of his accursed tutor, without one spark of even practical ability to atone for his misdeeds. The repairs of

the cathedral are conducted in the most puerile manner. What think you of

the replacing finials and crockets upon pinnacles, &c., when flying buttresses themselves threaten to fall daily?"

After a series of such atrocities, architectural indignation concentrates into religious conviction. It is the state of Ely-noble Ely, since so fitly and gracefully restoredwhich carries this wonderful process to its climax.

"Would you believe it possible?" asks the indignant artist; "there is no person appointed to attend to the repairs of the building, and the only person who has been employed during the last sixty years is a bricklayer. Not even common precautions are taken to keep the building dry.

The fine western tower is falling have taken place, and are becoming into great decay, and alarming fissures menacing to various portions of the western end, which receive the pressure of the tower.

I truly regret to say that in my travels I am daily witnessing fresh instances of the disgraceful conduct of the greater portion of the Established clergy. I can assure you that, after a most close and impartial investigation, I feel perfectly convinced the Roman Catholic Church is the only true one, and the only one in which the grand and sublime style of church architecture can be restored."

After this conclusion, the resolve which follows, with the whimsical term assigned for its accomplishment, is perfectly reasonable and characteristic. "A very good chapel is now building in the north," continues the almost convert, with the utmost good faith and gravity," and I shall recant." Whether he kept when it is complete I certainly think his time, and recanted only when the good chapel in the north was complete, Mr Ferrey singularly omits to tell us; but the amiable biographer, though not himself a Catholic, does not neglect to afford his readers one overpowering proof of the sincerity of the change in his hero's sentiments, equally professional and characteristic. During the earlier part of his residence at Salisbury, Pugin was still in communion with the English Church, and regularly attended divine service in the cathedral. But after his secession he frequented the Roman Catholic

chapel of the town-an ill-shaped room, having no pretensions whatever to an ecclesiastical character. This change in his attendance from the glorious cathedral to the miserable chapel was a sacrifice of no small kind for a man of Pugin's taste to make. It was out of the question to alter the building, but he did his utmost to impart dignity to the externals of public worship, which were at that time sunk to the lowest level of bad taste." This triumph of faith raises the young convert into an altogether heroic position. Notwithstanding the anticlimax of that ill-shaped room, he not only held steadily by his new faith, but blazed forth upon the world, not long after, in a book, in which the new régime of art which he was to inaugurate received its first important stimulus, given with all the exaggerated fervour of a religious neophyte, who could see no good possible anywhere but through the medium of his new faith.

This publication was entitled Contrasts, and was published in 1836. The book has dropped out of all living knowledge, except among members of the author's own profession, or those architectural connoisseurs whom his own labours have increased so considerably. But it was, when first published, the most daring assault upon the public mind, imagination, and temper, which had been made for long enough. The volume is a small quarto, very sparing in point of text, and exuberant in illustrations, which it appears no bookseller would undertake to produce, and which was published by the daring author himself, at St Marie's Grange, in the heart of discomfort and mediævalism. This trenchant publication sets forth, in a style which, for unmistakable distinctness of meaning, almost rivals the naïve letters quoted above, the entire impossibility of Christian architecture in a Protestant community, and demonstrates not only that the Reformation has made an end of all true art, and appreciation of art, in England, but that nothing

except increasing decay, meanness, and penury in this important department of human endeavour is possible to us, until we return, as a nation, to the bosom of the Church. This uncompromising statement is not left to stand or fall on its own merits or the character of the accuser, but is backed and supported with a satirical force much more powerful than words by a pencil more graphic and eloquent than the pen. The substance and force of the work are in these pictures. One can laugh at the new convert's blaze of newfangled fervour, and take his contemptuous estimate of Protestantism at its true value, but one cannot laugh at the Contrasts visibly presented before us. On one page it is a splendid Belgian Hotel de Ville, placed side by side with the meagre impotence of Guildhall. On another, the noble church of St Mary Redcliffe in dread juxtaposition with the inhuman edifice known as All-Souls, Langham Place. With a similar savage scorn Pugin pursues his century through miserable parish-chapels, despoiled cathedralaltars, vulgar tombs and streetcrosses, inns and parsonages, cruelly exposing its ignoble devices, and triumphing over its weakness. The examples are chosen cruelly, Mr Ferrey says, and the contrast much too perfect. But no one can deny that the comparison is fair to the spirit, however it may have been to the letter. With an entirely irresistible force these sketches go to the heart of the subject. All-Souls, Langham Place, is a woeful specimen, but it is in perfect harmony with its "period;" and nobody can deny that the bald fronts and unmeaning ornaments which Pugin opposes to all the endless wealth of Gothic detail and nobility of Gothic form, are quite true and unexaggerated renderings both of the individual buildings represented, and the spirit of the time that produced them. The blow was fair and downright, and perfectly legitimate. We are not informed what amount of commotion it produced at the mo

ment, but ere long the singular performance came to a second edition, and this time found a publisher. Such subjects are generally discussed by dilettante voices, and are not patent to the multitude; but this hearty utterance of honest discontent and scorn was distinct enough in its broad exaggeration to reach even the vulgar understanding, and make its moral apparent to the least-instructed vision. Perhaps the fact of its daring absurdity in point of assertion did not make it less acceptable to the Anglican mind, then stirring with thoughts of Rome. The lofty assumption with which Pugin takes it for granted that "in Christian architecture alone we find the faith of Christianity embodied, and its practices illustrated," must have been deeply gratifying and satisfactory to many a wavering soul which could at least set to work to renovate its chancel, and restore its ecclesiastical remains, while still wavering on the Papistical highroad; and there cannot be any doubt that this first bold stroke must have had infinite effect in directing the attention both of artists and spectators to the extraordinary failure, in everything that attracts the eye and imagination, of modern buildings, in comparison with those old fabrics which have stood the wear and tear of centuries without losing any of their pristine claim upon the admiration and love of

men.

This book was the characteristic manifesto of the new Catholic. Though he took the trouble to explain, in a long letter published at the time, or shortly afterwards, the spiritual nature of those convictions, of which he had so triumphantly proved the sincerity by his attendance in the ill-shaped room at Salisbury, and was, there can be no doubt, warm and thorough in his new creed as in everything else he entered into, nothing can be more quaint and amusing than the architectural medium through which Pugin, and his biographer no less, contemplate such a serious matter

"Had he,

as a change of creed. however, remained in the church of his birth," says Mr Ferrey, with a sigh of regret at once professional and friendly, "what a noble field would have been open to him in the restoration of those ancient churches and cathedrals with whose beauty he was so familiar!" It is a new way of looking at a religious crisis, and has the advantage of honesty and simplicity, which a pretence of loftier motives might have failed in.

After this new direction had been given to his career, Pugin, with all the confidence of a neophyte, plunged into projects for the reformation and perfection of his new Church-projects which were at the same time religious efforts and professional speculations. The lips that had raved of the desecration of cathedrals, now burst into "vehement reprobation of the depraved and paltry character of some of the sacerdotal vestments;" and before the new Catholic was well settled in his altered faith, he began not only to condemn, but arrogantly to thrust his ever-restless hand into the work of emendation. Nothing escaped his incessant activity of mind and pencil. Before many years had elapsed he had every sort of work on hand for the service of the Church. Not only painted glass, a not unfit adjunct to his architectural labours, but brass work, goldsmith's work, embroidery, and ecclesiastical millinery of all kinds, occupied his restless genius, and were executed under his superintendence. As early as 1836, a reverend Catholic doctor compliments him with "the assurance which I felt that your designs of Catholic church-plate would on many occasions propitiate the goodwill of the man of taste towards the olden faith, and perhaps induce some to inquire into and adopt its tenets." All went on triumphantly at this early beginning. He acquired the friendship of Lord Shrewsbury, as ardent a Catholic and anxious an opponent of "depraved sacerdotal