10 



petence, or impatience of the least debate of their skill, evince unmiti- 

 gated dislike to anything like free criticism upon architectural works, 

 and assume to ridicule the idea of the taste for architecture extend- 

 ing much beyond the limits of the profession ; but, to the architect who 

 loves his art, and aspires to growing excellence in its practice, no 

 encouragement can be equal to the presence of a public acknowledging 

 its value, and informed as to its legitimate aims, and capable of dis- 

 criminating between what is and what is not worthy of rank among its 

 productions. 



Such a tribunal of public opinion stimulated the exercise and 

 tempered the exuberance of the artistic faculties in classic Greece ; such 

 a one awaits the compositions of the musician in modem Germany ; 

 and, while perhaps in our own country alone is it expressed with equal 

 freedom on the acts of the politician, even here, despite the mechanical 

 tendencies of our national and necessarily commercial spirit, we may 

 trace the gradual development of the power and will to apply it also to 

 the productions of the liberal arts. 



It is in the hope of aiding, in some minute degree, what I consider so 

 desirable a direction of the public attention, that I have attempted the 

 present essay, and the more willingly, as addressing many who by 

 education and position are fitted both to estimate the importance, and 

 in a measure control the tendency of such a spirit of criticism ; on the 

 former of wliich points I look confidently for their concurrence, and as 

 regards the latter, shall hope to secure at least some share of their 

 sympathy. 



The position of architecture, as practised at the present day, and par- 

 ticularly amidst relations so extended, and social . arrangements so com- 

 plicated, so varied, and often so refined as our own, is, I think, unlike 

 what it can ever have occupied, so far as we can see, in any past age or 

 state of society. For though refinement of art in Greece, and of luxury 

 in Rome, stamped with their respective characters the architecture of 

 either state, and that deeply, in proportion to the perhaps unparalleled 

 national development of their characteristic tendencies, still, in neither 

 was the practice of the art so extended and varied in its apphcation and 

 requirements as among ourselves — the public buildings, properly so 

 called, of each, almost engrossing its powers — a fact sufficiently proved 

 by what remains of any importance have been preserved to us. 



In this I do not overlook the fact of domestic arrangements being 

 carried to a high degree of luxury in ancient dwellings, but their 

 character of privacy, and method of internal lighting, precluded the use 

 of architecture in its higher forms externally, while the theatres, baths, 

 temples, bridges, aqueducts, regal palaces, and mausoleums, afforded 

 full scope for its application. 



