Various kinds of Spires.

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reason of some alteration made by Sir Gilbert Scott at the bottom or junction with the tower, and also that St. Mary's Oxford was seriously damaged by some such alteration, without the excuse of having to rebuild it. Without mentioning dozens of inferior ones, all these things prove what a delicate matter the junction of a spire with the tower is. And so far as I can judge from pictures, the foreign builders very seldom were successful there. The transition ought to be decided and unmistakable and yet should appear easy and natural. In some modern spires and some ancient foreign, but no English ones, you cannot say where the transition is. In many others, a man seems to have picked up a spire somewhere as he might an extinguisher and dropped it on a tower. I must confess that I am not quite satisfied in all respects with one which is substantially my own, St. Chad's Headingley; but I had no opportunity of seeing it while it was building at the critical point; without which no one can infer from drawings what the effect will be. If I had seen it I should certainly have altered it by trial with some wooden patterns, to fill up the corners better, which are too abrupt—a better fault however than the opposite one.

A few old spires rise from an octagonal addition to the tower, but the old builders evidently perceived that it is a mistake and appears to lower the dignity of a tower to a turret, and so those few examples were not followed, but remain as warnings what to avoid.

A brooch' spire, or one where the cardinal faces at the spring quite reach the sides of the tower, is very apt to look too heavy for the tower when seen on the square, though it may not when seen diagonally, especially if the tower has not deep buttresses and

the spire is as tall as the tower, as at Salisbury and most of the great ones. Accordingly many E. English brooch spires were not so tall as the tower, i.e. were blunter a good deal than many of the non-brooches, where the bottom of the spire is quite within the tower, often leaving a passage all round. Probably the angle 1110, or the width='2 of the height, or 20 feet wide to 100 high, is the sharpest spire that looks well. Some modern ones look more like spikes than spires, by reason of the miserable thinness of the towers, which on the average have barely, or not half the sectional area of old ones of the same height, or 14 ft. inside where old ones would be 20, and II where old ones would be 16. This is constantly being brought to my notice in connection with bells, about which architects will not condescend to learn anything, as if it was not their business to learn how to provide properly for all the objects of a building. They will dictate to you about desks and seats and altar cloths, and leave the weightier matters of the building, which can never afterwards be cured, to be done as wrong as possible. I must refer to my book on Clocks and Bells for instructions on those subjects. Even independently of that, few people seem to know as a mere matter of architecture, that the towers of old English churches were very seldom higher. than four times their width without the buttresses, and generally much less. Boston is the only notable exception, and 60 ft. of that are due to the lantern at the top, which is more of the nature of a spire. The tower of Dundry near Bristol is narrower than usual for its height, but it is only a small one altogether.

Spire Beds.-There is a point of some consequence in spire-building which I have never seen noticed in any book, viz., whether the beds should be horizontal

Spire construction.

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or at right angles to the faces. Though the former is almost invariably done, the latter is certainly the right construction and the strongest against any accident by storm, because in that case every successive piece of spire from the top downwards lies in a kind of cup, which tends to prevent the stones from spreading; or you may say that any narrow vertical slice of spire forms a straight-sided arch, which cannot fall in by reason of the adjacent stones, nor outwards by reason of this construction, while the stones can slide outwards if they have a horizontal bed. The tops of spires and pinnacles are oftener loosened by wind, decay of mortar, and, I suspect, lightning, than most people have any idea of; and it is certainly desirable that the construction should be such as will be safe even if the joints get loose. I do not find either that builders say that square-jointed stones are more expensive than horizontal ones. The face stones manifestly take less trouble and less waste, while the fewer corner stones perhaps take more. As many of the top courses of a spire as can be should be tied down by a long iron rod through the finial and a cross bar inside the spire with a nut at the bottom.

Conductor. This rod, whether ending in a vane or not, should be the first part of the lightning conductor, which is always now a wire rope or in. thick, which should be attached to the very bottom of the rod, or it may be to the nut at the bottom. It is wonderful how inveterate the folly is of putting glass rings or neckcloths round the conductors when they are fixed to the wall; as if the 'electric fluid' (as the newspapers call it) wanted to leave the wire which is a good conductor for the wall which is a bad one; or would be deterred by a bit of glass if it did.

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Lightning Conductors.

I have always thought the climax of architectural science was reached at Christ Church Doncaster in 1830, the spire of which was capped in great triumph by the architect's own hand with a glass cone or finial to frighten away the lightning: which however was perverse enough to disregard the intimidation and knocked the spire over in the short space of four years. Another common piece of folly is taking the conductor outside through a window instead of the shortest way down inside, as if the 'electric fluid,' like a bad smell, would be less dangerous in the open air. And yet another is the idea that it ought to go down into water, which these philosophers seem to imagine will dissolve the lightning like salt, or kill it as if it were gunpowder, while it will be dangerous if left dry. All these absurdities were proposed to me at the rebuilding of the great Doncaster church in 1858, and for the satisfaction of the alarmists I got Faraday's opinion: I need not say what it was. The Houses of Parliament were conductored by Sir W. Snow Harris, who perhaps had even more experience than Faraday in that matter, and he laid the copper bands actually in the walls under the plaster.

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Wooden Spires.-Church spires now are almost invariably of stone; though occasionally we do see wooden ones on small churches, covered with lead, or slates, or those pieces of split oak called shingles,' which look like narrow flat tiles, but whiter, and look very well too, and last a long time, perhaps as long as any other covering, without repair. Slates do not look well on spires, if they do anywhere, which certainly the common smooth blue slates do not, as I observed before, though the old grey Westmoreland slates do. Every objection to lead for roofs (see p. 181) applies à fortiori to spires,

the steepest kind of roof. The old ones were leaded in diagonal pieces, which also look the best. The tallest spire in the world, that of old St. Paul's, was leaded, until it was burnt down, some years before the burning of the whole cathedral in 1666; and so is the curious twisted spire of Chesterfield church, which some people are silly enough to believe is really upright, or the top vertically over the centre of the base; whereas the twist. is also a bend of the timbers through some defect of original construction, which, like all such defects, has a tendency to increase itself, as gravity is always acting with it, and gravity never sleeps.

Spires are so generally octagonal that it may appear superfluous to speak of any others. But there are cases where it is better to make them hexagonal; the corner turrets of Worcester cathedral tower are part of the original design as to their plan, and are perhaps unique as hexagonal ones in that position. There are however two reasons for making a small spire hexagonal in certain cases; one is, where you want a tower rather wider one way than the other with a spire on it; for you may see in a minute that a hexagon will only fit a parallelogram whose sides are in the proportion of the height of an equilateral triangle to its sides, or •866 to 1, or 19 to 22 very nearly. The other reason is that reducing a small square tower to an octagon sometimes makes the faces too small for clock dials, or even for windows, and these two causes may often concur in a small bell-tower which also forms a sort of porch at the west end of a church, either engaged (inside) or disengaged (outside). Sometimes also in domestic building turning the square into a hexagon enables you to make a dial face more directly as you want it. I have had a case of that kind myself where