11 



With ourselves, how greatly must such a list be extended, and how 

 varied are the purposes to which architecture must be adapted. To our 

 commerce in exchanges, newsrooms, and the like ; to science and 

 literature, in museums and libraries ; to education in every grade, from 

 the richly endowed college to the village school; while in hospitals, 

 infirmaries, alms-houses, and every variety of charitable institution, it 

 finds a field, I may say, unknown to the architects of the times 

 referred to. 



The requirements of Christian worship again demand a style of 

 buildings to which the ancient temple bore little analogy, though their 

 most usual arrangements may be traced to the model afforded by the 

 ancient basilicse, transformed as they often were from heathen courts to 

 Christian temples. 



Another material difference in the position of the modem architect is 

 his intimate acquaintance with the great variety of styles which have 

 existed throughout the civilized world for many ages ; a knowledge likely 

 to encumber and perplex the unphilosophical and empirical practitioner, 

 but, as truly argued by Sir Joshua Reynolds with respect to a sister art, 

 the best foundation to ensure originality in the practice of the man who 

 studies his art with leading reference to its principles of development 

 and association. 



It is a misfortune that comparatively few modern architects take the 

 latter course to the extent of which the art admits, and the consequence 

 has been a general spirit of copyism, rather than of adaptation, which 

 has done much to rob architecture of the claims to geneml estimation, 

 which, if rightly pursued, it would assert. 



No such field of knowledge was enjoyed by the architects of the 

 classic ages, or those of the first gothic periods, who, taking the simplest 

 form in which construction in each peculiar case presented itself, worked 

 out and refined upon it till it became a system, the results of which we 

 are in a great measure familiar with, but the more subtle principles of 

 which we are still endeavouring to discover. 



Of course, I do not deny the influence of traditional knowledge, and 

 the transmission of the arts of life through successive generations ; but 

 as regards the Greeks especially, the growth of style in architecture, 

 from the simplest elements, is so obvious as to warrant fully the dis- 

 belief in its dependence, to any material extent, on external influence. 



Such being the difference between their position in regard to pre- 

 ceding art and our own, their example affords no ground, as also it is 

 inconsistent with the known course of human thought and habits of 

 action, to propose, as some have done, the limitation of modern practice 

 to some one style of architecture ; and it is equally futile to speculate on 



