while the philosopher finds and enjoys its own peculiar beauty in the worthless weed as well as in the fairest flower of the garden, yet he never suffers his garden to be overrun with weeds; and warn them against the mistake of little naturalists, who look with indifference on a wheat-sheaf or an oak of the forest, but go into raptures over a parcel of slime from the bottom of a pond-let such a man extend the domain of taste as wide as he can without confusing its boundaries, or suffering the forms of art, suitable to the requirements of one age of the world and one stage of society, to usurp upon those which the consent of civilized nations has appropriated to another period and another social predicament. But Mr. Ruskin will not go with us in any of these suggestions. He thinks the medieval state of society gave the proper ideas of construction for all modern imitation; that the appropriation of other forms to our civil and ecclesiastical edifices by the artists of the renaissance was an error and ought to be corrected; that the ducal palace of Venice, for example, is the model of constructive proportion in house architecture, and San Michele, of Pavia, a pattern for a church. His objections to the renaissance are urged with an almost abusive force of invective, and we have little doubt if this expression of our adherence to the school of Palladio, of Wren, and Chambers, should happen to meet his eye, Mr. Ruskin would at once set us down for uninstructed and perverse imbeciles. We owe too much to his genius to be intolerant of its excesses: we trust to the practical operation of Camdenism for opening the eyes of medieval enthusiasts, and of Mr. Ruskin himself at no distant period, to the necessary alliance between forms and opinions. In the mean time, nothing can be more significant of the coming change than Mr. Ruskin's own undisguised alarm at the progress of Popish ideas in England. We would not say anything bitter to a man to whom we owe so many hours of sweet enjoyment-an enjoyment, too, whose sweetness depends so much on the entire reliance we have in the sincerity of the man; but we cannot help remarking that architectural Pusevism has had no more efficient promoter in England than John Ruskin, and that, until his alarm at the progress of dogmatical

Puseyism broke forth in this publication, no one not honoured with his personal acquaintance could have supposed him to be the decided Protestant he now appears to be.

We may make the same remark of Mr. Macaulay. His papers in the Edinburgh Review greatly assisted in producing that sentiment in the public mind which his "History of England" has been written to check. Sir James Stephen will probably be the next who will find himself compelled to warn the British youth against the fruits of his own fantastic culture in the same garden of opinion, as bitter apples of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Mr. Ruskin's irritation at the Romanising tendencies of the English vents itself in a singularly unreasonable aggression on Mr. Pugin. This gentleman has certainly produced a great many disa greeable buildings, but we suppose he has had monkish and fashionable mediæval warrant for them. The students and professors of Maynooth have the satisfaction, we dare say, of being able to silence any criticism of their halls and lodgings, by reference to something old enough and ugly enough to be counted an unimpeachable model. It is also true, we believe, that there are some ecclesiastics whose minds are clouded by æsthetical doubt, and whose eyes do not rest with complete satisfaction on these learned storehouses, or storehouses of learning. Mr. Pugin, however, could hardly have expected that his correctnesses would be exploded by such a bombshell, and from a battery in his rere, too, as has been projected into the midst of his piscinas and crockets by Mr. Ruskin. We extract the passage, not for the purpose of damaging Mr. Pugin, for the excess of its censure will rather react in that artist's favour in the minds of candid readers, but as a remarkable instance of the retributive reaction ofenthusiasm, which punishes a man for his own extravagances, by making the self-same errors in another appear to him intolerable and disgusting:

"It is of the highest importance, in these days, that Romanism should be deprived of the miserable influence which its pomp and picturesqueness have given it over the weak sentimentalism of the English people. I call it a miserable influence, for of all motives to sympathy with the Church of Rome, this I unhe

sitatingly class as the basest. the being lured into the Romish Church by the glitter of it, like larks into a trap by broken glass; to be blown into a change of religion by the whine of an organ-pipe; stitched into a new creed by gold threads on priests' petticoats; jingled into a change of conscience by the chimes of a belfry. I know nothing in the shape of error so dark as this, no imbecility so absolute, no treachery so contemptible. I had hardly believed that it was a thing possible, though vague stories had been told me of the effect, on some minds, of mere scarlet and candles, until I came on this passage in Pugin's Remarks on Articles in the Rambler' :

"Those who have lived in want and privation are the best qualified to appreciate the blessings of plenty; thus, to those who have been devout and sincere members of the separated portion of the English Church-who have prayed, and hoped, and loved, through all the poverty of the maimed rites which it has retained-to them does the realisation of all their longing desires appear truly ravishing.

Oh !

then, what delight-what joy unspeakable! when one of the solemn piles is presented to them, in all its pristine life and glory!-the stoups are filled to the brim the rood is raised on high; the screen glows with sacred imagery and rich device; the niches are filled; the altar is replaced; sustained by sculptured shafts; the relics of the saints repose beneath; the body of our Lord is enshrined on its consecrated stone; the lamps of the sanctuary burn bright; the saintly portraitures in the glass windows shine all gloriously; and the albs hang in the oaken ambries, and the copechests are filled with orphreyed baudekins; and pix, and pax, and chrismatory are there, and thurible, and cross.'

"One might have put this man under a pix, and left him, one should have thought; but he has been brought forward, and partly received, as an example of the effect of ceremonial splendour on the mind of a great architect. It is very necessary, therefore, that all those who have felt sorrow at this should know at once that he is not a great architect, but one of the smallest possible or conceivable architects.

I am sorry to have to speak thus of any living architect; and there is much in this man, if he were rightly estimated, which one might both regard and profit by. He has a most sincere love for his profession, a heartily honest enthusiasm

for pixes and piscinas; and though he will never design so much as a pix or a piscina thoroughly well, yet better than most of the experimental architects of the day. Employ him by all means, but on small work. Expect no cathedral of him; but no one at present can design a better finial. That is an exceedingly beautiful one over the western door of St. George's; and there is some spirited impishness and switching of tails in the supporting figures at the imposts. Only do not allow his good designing of finials to be employed as an evidence in matters of divinity, nor thence deduce the incompatibility of Protestantism and art."-pp. 370-2.

Mr. Ferguson, also, whose ambitious attempt at a classification of the cyclopædia has excited some attention among thinking men, receives a pretty severe handling, in the course of which Mr. Ruskin descends to the use of triple notes of admiration, as a means of expressing his dissent from Mr. Fergu son's technics, æsthetics, and phonetics. The inadequacy of a foppish arrangement to the wants of philosophy might have better been made to appear with less of verbal gesticulation.

Mr. Garbett, again, an ingenious writer on decorative architecture, who has had the boldness to question some of the dogmatical postulates of the "Seven Lamps," is treated with much slighting animadversion. In truth, Mr. Ruskin exhibits a degree of bad temper in this volume which greatly surprises and, we must own, grieves us; for it ought to be the wish of every lover of truth and beauty that the genius of the age, which seems best fitted for expounding and advancing the principles of just criticisms in the arts, should perform its office in entire freedom from disturbing or distorting influences.

Of course, these petulant sallies will produce angry replies. We must hope that none of the stones of Venice will be shattered in the collision. As yet we have not seen any of the retorts of the injured parties, and happily living. outside of their arena, we possibly never shall.

One contemptible trifle only, half banter, half objurgation, called "Ruskinism," has reached our hands. We cannot affront any of the gentlemen

We

we have mentioned, by ascribing to him so unworthy a performance. hope they will vindicate themselves in quite a different manner. Mr. Pugin must try and take his revenge by designing something which Mr. Ruskin himself will have to applaud. Mr. Ferguson, we dare say, has by this time handed over his phonetics to Major Rawlinson, and has learned to be indifferent to the fate of an unattainable theory. Mr. Garbett alone has been invited to the discussion of a tangible subject in dispute; and if he please to break a lance with his challenger, we promise him that the lists shall be fairly kept, so far as we may be witnesses of the tournament.

We have strayed from the tenor of our subject. It was at the chapter on the arch-load that we diverged into the disquisitions which fill the preceding pages. We return to our building, in which we have now ascended as high as the roof. Theoretically we should say that the true form of roofs in these climates must be regulated by the slope at which snow will slide off. But as far as regards the facility of getting rid of snow, most of our city roofs might as well be flat. We are quite agreed with Mr. Garbett that a gutter behind a parapet is merely a trap for damp. Let any one here in Dublin look at the Provost's house, or the house of the Dublin Society, the roofs of which terminate on the cornice, and compare the compactness and safety of such an arrangement with a leaded valley hidden behind a dwarf wall, at the back of which all the snow of a winter's day might accumulate undisturbed, and under which all the ends of the rafters are perpetually in danger of being rotted. Certainly the former is the more complete, as it is the cheaper and the more elegant arrangement. Speaking of roofs and snow-storms, let us remark that the arched overtures of many of our railway stations appear to have been designed without regard to the contingency of having to support any much greater pressure than that of their own weight. We should suppose that two feet in depth of snow would crush any of these bent plates of corrugated metal quite flat. Similar bad consequences might be apprehended from a lodgment of the same kind in the valleys of the lateral roofs of the Crystal Palace. Whether with or without a parapet, however, the roof of every edifice built

in this part of the world ought, we conceive, to form a prominent feature of its elevation. In rainless countries only can the eye rest with satisfaction on a flat covering. But the extreme high pitch of Gothic and Tudesque roofs is equally unpleasing. We have seen a five-story house in Bavaria, two of the stories of which were in the side-walls, and the rest in the roof. Mr. Ruskin ascribes the taste of the Transalpine nations for lofty roofs to other causes besides precaution against the lodging of snow; and we may remark, as corroborative of his theory, that these very high roofs are not found in Switzerland or the Tyrol.

"The true Gothic gable, as it is the simplest and most natural, so I esteem as the grandest of roofs, whether rising in ridgy darkness, like a grey slope of slaty mountains, over the precipitous walls of the northern cathedrals, or stretching in lowering breadths above the white and square-set groups of the southern architecture. But the difference between its slope in the northern and southern architecture is a matter of far greater importance than is commonly supposed, and it is this to which I would especially direct the reader's attention.

One main cause of it, the necessity of throwing off snow, in the north, has been a thousand times alluded to; another I do not remember to have seen noticed, namely, that rooms in a roof are comfortably habitable in the north, which are painful sotto piombi in Italy; and that there is in wet climates a natural tendency in all men to lie as high as possible out of the damp and mist. These two causes, together with accessible quantities of good timber, have induced in the north a general steep pitch of gable, which, when rounded or squared above a tower, becomes a spire or turret; and this feature, worked out with elaborate derivation, is the key-stone of the whole system of aspiration, so called, which the German critics have so ingeniously and falsely ascribed to a devotional sentiment pervading the northern Gothic. I entirely and boldly deny the whole theory."-p. 146.

It is a theory which we have ourselves often doubted; but before venturing on an entire bold denial of it, we would desire some surer grounds on which to found a judgment than a speculative suggestion, that perhaps all spires were originally but conical tower roofs, and consequently, all pinnacles but imitation spires. We have

no love for the northern Gothic, but we cannot dissociate the village spire that points to heaven from a devotional sentiment and purpose. At the same time, every instructed eye will have remarked how essential it is to the good effect of a spire, that it should have sufficient breadth of base, and really cover the top of its tower. Buttress pinnacles, however, have no alliance with roof coverings, and undoubtedly contribute as much as spires to the effect of aspiration. Amiens breathes that sentiment as strongly as Salisbury; Cologne is perhaps already as aspiratory as it will be when the west towers shall receive their steeples. In general, where we have occasion to differ from Mr. Ruskin, our dissent is in a matter of judgment; here we are for once unable to go with him in feeling; he hurts us with an unexpected impeachment of the devotional sentiment of the mediæval builders themselves, which we own appears to us unjust, and unsustained by any probable evidence. We would not reproduce the buildings of those ages, because we would not revive their manners, or their modes of thought or worship; but we cannot look at what the middle age architects have done, and deny them credit for lofty thoughts, and effective methods of expressing them in their buildings. Mr. Ruskin says:

"Our cathedrals were, for the most part, built by worldly people, who loved the world, and would have gladly stayed in it for ever; whose best hope was the escaping hell, which they thought to do by building cathedrals, but who had very vague conceptions of heaven in general, and very feeble desires respecting their entrance therein; and the form of the spired cathedral has no more intentional reference to heaven, as distinguished from the flattened slope of the Greek pediment, than the steep gable of a Norman house has, as distinguished from the flat roof of a Syrian one."p. 146.

little wish to see San Zeno's of Verona, or San Michele's of Pavia transported hither, as we would wish to see reproduced in this century the mediaval symbolisms of Chartres or Rouen. If we understand Mr. Ruskin aright, he would desire to reproduce in the British islands the Lombardo-Venetian forms and modes of church building and palace building, and holds that nothing is accomplished till he shall plant the Palazzo Ducale in the middle of Westminster. Against all this we protest in the name of peace and commerce, and of the freedom and comfort of modern life, which imperatively require a different species of lodging and accommodation for civilized men in their civic, social, and devotional congregations. But it would be a loss of much enjoyment to the world if it had not these monuments of the piety and magnificence of a former and different state of society to visit and contemplate. If these prelections of Mr. Ruskin will assist us to the more intelligent enjoyment of whatever is admirable in their structure or decoration, we will be well rewarded for the pains bestowed on his book, even though not the least of these may be our difficulty in sometimes preserving a temperate dissent from his opinions:

"Circumstance and sentiment," he goes on to say, "aiding each other, the steep roof becomes generally adopted and delighted in through the north; and then, with the gradual exaggeration with which every pleasant idea is pursued by the human mind, it is raised into all manner of peaks, and points, and ridges; and pinnacle after pinnacle is added on its flanks, and the walls increased in height, in proportion, until we get, indeed, a very sublime mass, but one which has no more principle of aspiration in it than a child's tower of cards. What is more, the desire to build high is complicated with the peculiar love of the grotesque which is characteristic of the north, together with especial delight in the multiplication of small forms, as well as in exaggerated points of shade and energy, and a certain degree of consequent insensibility to perfect grace and quiet truthfulness; so that a northern architect, could not feel the beauty of the Elgin marbles, and there will always be (in those who have devoted themselves to this parti cular school) a certain incapacity to taste the finer beauties of Greek art, or to understand Titian, Tintoret, or

Raphael; whereas, among the Italian Gothic workmen this capacity was never lost, and Nino Pisano or Orcagna could have understood the Theseus in an instant, and would have received from it new life."-p. 148.

Elsewhere he speaks of the loathing with which an eye habituated to the repose and clearness of Fra Angelico or Bellini, looks on the first paintings of Rubens which it encounters on a survey of the northern galleries; and it is true that while pleasure uniformly attends the transition from northern to Italian cities, a sense of rudeness and grotesque clumsiness affects us on returning among the Tudesque Gothic buildings. Few persons of sensibility have not experienced these impressions, and no one will deny that they furnish the strongest argument for the Italian style.

Passing from spires to towers, and omitting several chapters of ingenious and recondite dissertation on roof-cornices, buttresses, forms and fillings of apertures, &c., we are much struck by a comparative view, arranged to the same scale, of the tower of a modern British church and the campanile of St. Mark's, at Venice, placed side by side. The British tower, diminutive in size and pierced with small windows at top and large ones below, is propped round its four corners by eight spreading buttresses, stepped and coped, as if the pressure of the dome of St. Paul's were contained in their little belfry; the Venetian tower, nearly three times the height and thirty times the size, springs aloft like the stem of a tree, without a single projection to break the plumb line of its sides from the foundation to the cornice. It needs no buttress: it is strong enough to support itself:

"The Venetian tower rises 350 feet, and has no buttresses though built of brick; the British tower rises 121 feet, and is built of stone, but is supposed incapable of standing without two huge buttresses at each angle. The St. Mark's tower has a high, sloping roof, but carries it simply, requiring no pinnacles at the angles; the British tower has no visible roof, but has four pinnacles for mere ornament. The Venetian tower has its lightest part at the top and is massy at the base; the British tower has its lightest part at the base, and shuts up its windows into a mere arrow slit at the top. What the tower was

built for at all must, therefore, it seems to me, remain a mystery to every beholder; for surely no studious inhabitant of its upper chambers will be conceived to be pursuing his employment by the light of the single chink on each side; and had it been intended for a belfry, the sound of its bells would have been as effectually prevented from getting out as the light from getting in." -p. 202.

We did not think the tower of St. Mark's had proportions so vast. Mr. Ruskin himself appears to have some misgivings as to its measurement; and cites Professor Willis as his authority for assigning it the prodigious elevation of 350 feet. The drawing which illustrates this part of the text is one of the most striking in Mr. Ruskin's volume; and the stern, strong Venetian tower lifting its belfry with so much directness of purpose in the midst of the variously decorated and fantastic edifices which surround its Piazza, looks like the genius of a vigorous and uncompromising criticism, standing apart from the crowd of minor writers, and exposing, at a height far above their reach, the examples of simplicity, of dignity, and self-reliance. Speaking of Mr. Ruskin's illustrations, it is due to him to declare that we have never been of the number who have derided his plates of the "Seven Lamps."

"They are black, they are overbitten, they are hastily drawn," we use Mr. Ruskin's own words, "but their truth is carried to an extent never before attempted in architectural drawing. It does not in the least follow that because a drawing is delicate, or looks careful, it has been carefully drawn from the thing represented; in nine cases out of ten careful and delicate drawings are made at home. It is not so easy as the reader, perhaps, imagines, to finish a drawing altogether on the spot, especially of details seventy feet from the ground and any one who will try the position in which I have had to do some of my work-standing, namely, on a cornice or window sill, holding by one arm round a shaft, and hanging over the street (or canal at Venice), with my sketch-book supported against the wall from which I was drawing by my breast, so as to leave my right hand free-will not thenceforward wonder that shadows should be occasionally carelessly laid in, or lines drawn with some unsteadiness. But steady or infirm, the sketches of which these plates in the 'Seven Lamps'