54 



and art divide the universe between them, and the tendency of the 

 fonner is to extend the field of the latter, any new discovery presenting 

 the muses ^vith a new theme. " If," as Wordsworth had remarked, •' the 

 labours of men of science should ever create any material revolution, 

 direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we 

 habitually receive, the poet would sleep then no more than at present : 

 he would be ready to follow the steps of the man of science, not only on 

 those general indirect effects, but he would be at his side carrying sensa- 

 tion into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest 

 discoveries of the chemist, the botanist, or mineralogist would be as 

 proper objects of the poet's art 'as any upon which it could be employed." 

 But there was none of the fine arts that was more inalienably associated 

 with and related to the present, or be benefited by every improvement 

 in mechanical science, than Architecture — a truth that had scarcely 

 been recognized, in the^ present day, either by architects or their 

 employers. The architect's province was to take the elements of his 

 style — the material characters of his architecture — from nature, 

 through the medium of, or assisted by, extant productions of art ; and, 

 in the exercise of his art, he was to throw these into the mould of the 

 actual requirements of the day. An edifice so wrought would become 

 an organised, harmonious, and living thing, instinct with the life of the 

 present hour, and expressing the idea of its peculiar and destined 

 purpose. Architecture was not the child of archaeology, the creature of 

 the traveller's sketch-book ; it was the child of its time ; and its mission 

 here was to erect, not Romanesque churches, or Greek temples, or Swiss 

 cottages, but British and nineteenth century edifices, pregnant with the 

 life, and, according to their peculiar purpose, embodying the ideas of the 

 present hour. It might be asked, were we to make no use of extant art ? 

 We were, he would reply, to make great use of it ; just the same use of it 

 that all wise literary men had made of extant literature ; the same use 

 that Dante made of preceding poets ; that Plato made of the wisdom of 

 Socrates ; just the same use that Watt and Davy made of known 

 science, to carry it forward and extend its boundai'ies. We were to study 

 their principles, and, as far as they were true to nature, adopt them : but 

 we were -not to copy their forms and masses. Nature, our type and model, 

 was an infinity, and the elements supplied by her were to be thrown into 

 the mould of our present purposes. If this were truthfully and faithfully 

 done, the result would be architecture worthy of Great Britain and of 

 the nineteenth century. 



After treating at length on the province of the sculptor, he observed 

 that sculpture was independent of poetry in her choice of walk ; it was 

 because poetry was the eldest that she had often been the inventor for the 



