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St. Bride's Steeple.

steeple (which old-fashioned word includes both towers and spires) in any form of the style called Classical. Wren's St. Bride's, which is decidedly the best of his spires, is a totally false construction and could not be what it looks, and must contain three or four times the weight of a spire such as Salisbury, which is far more beautiful. The tower below it, and his Westminster and other towers, are little or no better than the 'churchwarden Gothic' of fifty years ago. Domes indeed do belong to that style specially, but domes cannot do the work of towers, nor rise to any great height, except when they are very large; and Ely cathedral shows us that the internal effect of a dome can be got quite as well in the Gothic style. As churches are always expected to have steeples, both for bells and for appearance, that consideration alone is enough to retain the Gothic style for them.

It is also generally the cheapest and the best, in

the sense of getting the best appearance and easiest construction, for large halls, schoolrooms, and places of that kind, especially where

large windows are required; which are altogether unmanageable in the Italian style. I believe it will be found that, cæteris paribus, the Classical style is always more expensive for such purposes; and the construction, especially of the roof, is more necessary to be concealed. Indeed it is self-evident that the Gothic open timbered roof is the most genuine construction for that purpose; just as Gothic windows are the only ones that admit of any great size without iron framework, which is not architecture but engineering, and is not intended to be seen as an architectural feature.

FIG. 2.

But for buildings below these, or not involving these conditions, I cannot see that either style has any constructional advantage over the other. Several independent architects and surveyors with no Gothic prejudices gave evidence before the Parliamentary committee on the Foreign Office plans before spoken of, that there is no necessary difference in either convenience or expense between the

80

Styles for Houses.

Gothic and Classical styles for buildings of that kind, assuming the same degree of ornamentation in both cases. I am afraid however that I must add that most of the builders of Gothic houses have been for some years doing their best to refute this evidence which was then given in their favour, and to justify the assertions of their opponents that such houses are more expensive both to build and to keep in repair, and more inconvenient than those of any other style, except indeed the Greek temple style of the last century, which is now happily exploded and obsolete, and was simply a mass of absurdity in this climate and for buildings wanting windows in the sides. Subject to that remark, I cannot see that all the arguments or theories and so called principles that have been invented by their various advocates leave it any more than a matter of taste which of the existing old styles is to be used, except for churches and other buildings of that kind.

As a

Styles for Houses.-I suppose however that very few people will deny that the word 'picturesque' is more applicable to Gothic building, when it is done well, in something like the old way; but that is so seldom that this is the last epithet which is generally applicable to modern' Gothic houses. matter of fact, whether it need be so or not, the most comfortable and substantial looking houses since the real Elizabethan times are generally not Gothic, but probably more in the Dutch or Queen Anne style than any other, or somewhat later. I certainly do not mean that modern version of the so-called Queen Anne style which is just now in fashion with some architects, but something much solider and plainer. Italian ones have the same advantage of being what is popularly called square, and by builders self-contained,'

White Bricks and Red.

81

or speaking mathematically, parallelopipeds, having no projections or re-entering angles, and therefore containing the maximum of space within a given quantity of outside walls. They also have larger windows free from mullions than you can have in Gothic. But they can be built properly of nothing but stone, and large stones too, and stones of nearly equal size, and worked smooth, or at least fair,' all over, and all that is very expensive; while the genuine English styles and the Dutch require only small stones, of almost any sizes, and they are all the better for not being uniform or worked smooth; or they may be built of bricks, provided only they are not white; for I defy all the architects in the world to make a decent looking building out of them in any style of architecture yet invented. There may be in the womb of time, or in the brains of some unborn genius, a style which they will suit, but it has not come out yet. I just mention however that I have observed that very large white bricks of about twice the common size sometimes look tolerably like stones, and they would be more so if several sizes (all large enough) were used together; and this is the more curious because red bricks above the usual size look decidedly worse. But it is a very absurd waste of money to have special bricks made smaller than the usual size, as some architects do. When I speak of houses in the Italian style having these characteristics I do not mean the flimsy looking abominations which they call Italian villas,' and which are below the level of what can be called architecture at all; but rather, that which is described as the Florentine style in Mr. Garbett's Treatise on Design,' p. 243.

Elizabethan Style-Symmetry. It is not worth while to consider for any practical purpose a form of

G

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Elizabethan Style,

the Gothic style of house building which had a short run early in this century, but is properly obsolete, viz. what was called the Castellated;' for nothing could be more foolish than to imitate in these days a mode of building which was designed in rude times to fortify houses against violence, not of one or two nocturnal thieves getting in by back windows and picking locks, but of besieging armies. The earliest Gothic or English style which is worth imitating for domestic purposes is the Elizabethan. And with respect to this modern architects have fallen under a most strange delusion, encouraged doubtless by the writings of some fanciful amateurs, which their own experience and observation ought to have taught them to disregard, especially considering how contemptuously they usually write and speak of amateur architects. That delusion is that Elizabethan houses ought not to be symmetrical, or with the parts on each side of some middle line corresponding. We can never do anything now without overdoing it, or running from one extreme to another. Because the architects of the Palladian or Renaissance school had made symmetry a byword for absurdity, building shams or utterly useless parts and long 'wings' to balance each other, making a chapel to correspond with a washhouse and stables to match a servants' hall or a picture gallery, and so on, and because the older Gothic buildings were often unsymmetrical, where symmetry would have been inconvenient or impracticable, therefore up starts a race of generalisers who denounce symmetry as un-Gothic, un-English, contrary to all principles of true art, as a false, base, and altogether un-Christian kind of architecture.

If they had only taken the trouble to look at any