pay for, and precisely in the ratio of that payment. Those who play at bowls must not mind rubbers, and as this world goes the architect must expect his share of them, or decline the honours of a profession which Parliament has now put on this footing-that of exposure, namely, to public competition. But if a system so advantageous to the public is illmanaged, the most desirable contributions are withheld, and adventurers only will enter the lists. Instances may be quoted in which this has actually taken place; advertisements for important works have been answered by pupils and adventurers only; the committee or advertisers, sometimes from a sense of justice and that delicacy which gentlemen feel who find that they have committed themselves, are obliged to accept one of these, and saddle themselves with an unsatisfactory design. If a new competition is invited, a new class of evils enters; it is probable that the successful candidate will, as in the case of the Exchange, erect himself upon the disjected members of the foregoing designs, establish his work on piracy, and, like the South Sea Indian, mark his prowess by ornamenting himself with the scalps and teeth of his antagonists. When Apelles composed his Venus, he found nothing in nature, or in his own mind, that was perfect. Assembling and uniting into one, therefore, the scattered beauties of many, he accomplished that wonder which has ever since been synonymous with perfection in art. Those models gloried in their contributions, knowing that the prudent painter spared their defects. Not so the previous competitor in architecture, who finds his best notions pirated without ceremony, but sometimes his defects too exaggerated without mercy. In vain may the sufferers murmur; the laws of literary authorship are defined, and the courts will take cognizance of their infraction, but the arts have no remedy of the kind, and it is remarkable that Mr Poulett Thomson's (now Lord Sydenham) act for protection of design extends only to patterns for manufacturers during three months, and does not apply to the case we are at present discussing. The laws of honour do not operate equally upon all classes; the remedy, then, is to be obtained as it can, and chance and affection are the present arbiters of most competitions of artists.

The public, occupied with its own business, suffers itself to be led by the nose by the formality of a regular committee, more especially when the matter appears to be of no vital and political consequence. What is everybody's business is nobody's business; and transactions of this sort are done in a corner, to the disgrace and future inconvenience of a people. When, in the first competition for the work before us, the premiums were to be awarded, a prodigious machinery was set in motion, three eminent

architects were appointed, who took nearly two months to deliberate and award them. A great show of liberality was made by their exhibition to the public. But when the real prize was to be given, nine days, and one audience of the competitors with their designs, sufficed to decide the committee; one of those competitors not being suffered to produce or to explain his design in the tangible and palpable form of a model. No scientific or technical opinions are consulted, and a plan was chosen which the merest tyro in the profession might blush to own, and which, had it been subjected to the tender mercies of the umpires, or to still more candid judgment, would have been consigned to oblivion with the rest, premiated and unpremiated.

We do

Against Mr Tite's general talents and acquirements we have nothing to say. We have heard of them as respectable; and he is, we believe, a superior man of business, employed in the surveying interests of the Blackwall and Southampton railroads, and in the erection of some commercial buildings of the city, in which capital is paramount. What he is not, is-an architect endowed with qualifications of that class which should have been selected for the conduct of a great public work. not infer this from any former designs or constructions of his; we are not aware of his having produced any on a scale such as to assist our judgment. We conclude solely from the published evidence of his plans for the work before us; plans which obtained a preference of which we affirm them to be wholly unworthy. If we do not prove this, the reader will form his own opinion of our knowledge or justice; if we do, he will know how to estimate the amount of those qualities elsewhere.

We think it first but justice to Mr Donaldson, whose design we have mentioned already of those selected for eminent artistical merit, though excepted against, as architectural works, chiefly on frivolous grounds; and to Mr Cockerell, the competitor who alone survived the first competition, and whose rank, in the estimation of his brother and foreign artists, has been so long established, to give some notion, by illustrations and extracts from their Reports, of their designs, the former of which has

*

It may here be mentioned that Mr Cockerell has been lately successful in open competitions for works of great importance in the two Universities. At one of these (Cambridge University Library) his design was the surviving one of three distinct competitions; and between the first invitation to the architects, and the laying the first stone, nine years elapsed. This was very different from the "more haste than good speed " of the Royal Exchange, and has turned out more creditably to the accomplished arbiters of the University. However, it may be thought that there is a medium in all things.

VOL. XXXV. No. I.

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been plagiarised wholesale, without taste for its beauties, or sense to avoid what we deem its main faults; while Mr Cockerell's has also been clumsily copied in some of its details, although rejected for a work which it is flattery to call its inferior in all most essential particulars, or to bring within the line of comparison.

We ought to premise frankly, that of these two designs, which were most distinguished, whether by the suffrages of the umpires or of the committee (before the committee fell under its Common Council connexions and influences), we consider Mr Cockerell's the more true to the genius loci, as well as an admirable contrast to the successful one in internal arrangements. We, therefore, give it-as the committee first seemed to do-our decided preference. We do not, however, mean to maintain the perfection of all its parts, and by placing both before the reader we shall enable him to form an independent judgment. Mr Cockerell's we shall leave with some portions of its author's report, to explain itself and establish its own title to approbation. We are well acquainted with the readiness of the author himself to accept criticism when it can be obtained from any judicious quarter. In this case, the parties entrusted with the national work for which they had invited that gentleman to a second and selected competition, afforded no opportunity for correcting either his views or their own. They declined, as a committee, to visit the model he had prepared, on this second trial, at a great expense and on a large scale, as the best mode of bringing his whole plan before them, and securing fair criticism. The most trumpery pretext was brought against the inspection raisonnée due to this model, which was nine feet six inches long. The streets on either side, from the Mansion House to St Peter's, Cornhill, inclusive, on the south, and from Princes street, comprising the Bank to Bartholomew church, on the north, were also modelled to scale, making altogether 28 feet long. It expressed the internal architecture of the Exchange, as well as its external west, south, and east fronts, and elevated to the level of the eye, enabled the spectator to judge of its relation to all the surrounding buildings. It was alleged that the original instructions to the public competitors had excluded models, and that those instructions were binding upon this competition of two. They had already contradicted and stultified their past proceedings in all manner of ways; and here only they thought fit to revert to them, to exclude the best materials for sound judgment! Some of the members of the committee, indeed, visited this model, but as individuals only, without offering comment and without hearing explanation. The chairman (Mr Jones) and the Lord Mayor set their faces against considering

it! If this was not an absolute breach of trust in men acting for such a purpose, it was, at all events, a high contempt of art and of common sense.* The former had the effrontery to declare in the Common Council, that "he found all the best authorities opposed to models;" that a City builder, a friend of his, on whose judgment he relied, had seen this model, and had assured him "it was a complete deception;" a sample of the phrases used towards a gentleman invited expressly to employ his skill and zeal in this service, and so undisguised the animus with which his efforts were counteracted by those to whom the public have confided this work.+

* A letter, which appeared in the 'Globe,' gave the following authorities for the use of models::-

6

"Leon. Batista Alberti, 1. 2, c. 1, observes, that it is the part of a wise man to have a clear idea of the work which he proposes distinctly figured in his mind, so as to avoid all risk of an unsatisfactory issue; the practice, therefore, of the ancients,' says he, 'is highly to be commended, namely, that before the work is put into execution, the whole of the parts should be subjected to examination over and over again, by the architect and practical persons, not only by drawings, but also by models. And be it remembered, that in the model you may alter, add to, or renew the whole design, without reproach, until it is quite satisfactory.'

66 6

Every one knows,' says Quatremere de Quincy, 'that Michael Angelo put up the cornice of the Farnese Palace in wood model, before he determined its proportions; nor should the most experienced architect venture on a speculative opinion and dispense with the positive evidence of a model. That great artist frequently visited the model of St Peter's, by Sangallo, before he constructed his own. He made one for a palace for the Pope at St Rocco, and one for a church at Florence, first in clay and afterwards in wood-this method he also observed in the dome of St Peter's.

"In a letter to Vasari he laments the departure from his model by the contractor, and twice in that letter he says, havendo il modello fatto appunto, come fo d'ogni cosa.

666

Sometimes,' says the same author, a full size model is made, as the arch of St Antoine, by Perrault. Nor is the omission of Vitruvius as to this practice amongst the ancients any argument against it; and that it was usual, appears from Cicero's letter to Coelius, in which he says, I wish to see, as in a model, the form the edifice of the republic now assumes." The models of St Peter's by the various architects are now in the Vatican; that of St Paul's, of London, is in the fabric, as also one of the chapel at Pembroke, Cambridge, now in the library of that college; the models of Herrera and L'Inarra are now at Madrid,' ," &c. &c.

+ With reference to these specimens of City capacity, we were accustomed to take Ralph's story of the building of the Mansion House cum grano salis; but it must be admitted that the present case affords strong confirmatory evidence of its probability. In his Tour through London,' p. 37, he tells us, that" when it was resolved in the Common Council to build a Mansion House for the Lord Mayor, Lord Burlington, zealous in the cause of the arts, sent down an original design of Palladio, worthy of its author, for their approbation and adoption. The first question in court was, not whether this plan was proper, but whether the same Palladio was a freeman of

The following are extracts from Mr Donaldson's general statement, accompanying his design :

:

"The object of the author of this design has been to produce an edifice of a truly monumental character, conceived in the spirit of antique taste, at the same time combining with its classic appearance the various conveniences required by its destination. The reproach of travellers and critics of modern times, respecting the buildings of London, has been that the public edifices of foreign cities are superior to those of London in size and classic feeling, recalling the productions of ancient times. The City of London has within these few years been considerably embellished by the opening of new streets from London Bridge to the Mansion House, and thence towards Finsbury; this circumstance, and the richness of the architecture of the Bank, requires that the New Royal Exchange should, in scale and style of decoration, be of a leading nature, as the principal edifice appropriated to commercial purposes in the first commercial city of the world.

"In this design every room of the dimensions required by the instructions has been given, and even more; without sacrificing the character of the edifice, the architect has not neglected the consideration of the production of a considerable rental.

"DESCRIPTION OF THE PLANS.

The principal entrance is marked by an eight-columned portico, facing towards the Poultry and the Mansion House. ... A central line drawn from east to west forms the axis of the whole composition to which the portico in front and the court are at right angles. This throws, back one corner of the portico within the limit laid down in the lithographic plan, thus leaving unimpeded to view the whole of the central mass in front of the Bank.... The portico itself would be the largest by far of any in the metropolis, and second only among modern ones to that of the Madeleine of Paris. The columns are 4 feet 4 inches in diameter, consequently larger than those

the City or not. On this, great debates ensued, and it is hard to say how it might have gone, had not a worthy deputy risen up, and observed gravely, that it was of little consequence to discuss the point, when it was notorious that Palladio was a Papist, and incapable, of course. Lord Burlington's proposal was then rejected nem. con., and the plan of a freeman and a Protestant adopted in its room."

Whatever credit is due to this amusing tale, it is strikingly congruous with the actual state of things, as illustrated by an incident which occurred in a debate on Mr Cockerell's remonstrance (21st May last), in which the worthy deputy, Williams, argued on the right of preference of the ci-devant common-councilman,-whether sarcastically, or in real earnest, may be doubted, but the court repelled the charge with indignation. On that day Mr Heppel presented Mr Cockerell's reasonable petition, "that before the Court confirmed the choice they would require Mr Tite to make a model." Sir Peter Laurie and a respectable minority supported it. So bold a proposition excited much amusing discussion in Common Council.