60 Mr, E. B. Denison, [Feb. 11, 



too ruinous to stand, but the individual stones were too much decayed to 

 be rebuilt. Otherwise it would have been a proper case for mere resto- 

 ration, within the dominion of archaeology, and out of that of architec- 

 ture in its proper sense, which implies the designing of something 

 new. Now, although this tower was a fine one for its age, it was of the 

 very worst Gothic age ; and although, from the effects of time, audits 

 size, and general elegance of outline, it was on the whole beautiful, still 

 its faults were so notorious and glaring that they have always been 

 admitted even by the writers who have most celebrated it. It is 

 enough to say that the buttresses were feeble in projection, the arrange- 

 ment of the four and twenty windows the most monotonous of all the 

 towers in England — in fact it could not possibly have been more so ; 

 the upper part looked top-heavy, and the decoration of it was of the 

 most unimaginative character. Yet two of our first architects are 

 now employed to build up a copy of this tower exactly as it was ; or 

 as near as they can make it. For as in all copies, of course the faults 

 will be more apparent and the beauties less. Even if that were not 

 certain, still the defects of the old tower are precisely those which will 

 be more glaring in a new copy of it ; because the monotonousness of 

 this late perpendicular style is always strikingly aggravated by restora- 

 tion in new stone ; as is painfully apparent at St. Mary RedclifFe, where 

 one can hardly believe that the old work ever was like the new, which 

 is, or at least professes to be, exactly copied from it. The new tower 

 will therefore inevitably not look like the old one, and will inevitably 

 look worse. And for this of course the architects will be blamed, 

 probably by the foolish people who have insisted on or acquiesced in 

 the rebuilding as much as anybody. And they will deserve it. If 

 nobody at Taunton has the sense to know, they have, that the idea of 

 regarding a new copy of an old building as an antiquity is an absurdity 

 below the reach of ridicule. They cannot but know that the copy, 

 however good, will be no copy, because it cannot resemble what the 

 old tower has appeared to every person who ever set eyes upon it for 

 the last two hundred years, and probably much longer, and that people 

 who are silly enough to expect it must be deceived. They will 

 deserve the blame of the inevitable failure for another reason too ; 

 because they are descending from the position of architects to that of 

 mere clerks of the works, having only to see that the builder copies a 

 certain model, not designed by them, but by another architect in the 

 time of Henry VII., and a model worse than either of them could 

 design if left to himself. 



The precedent of Doncaster enables me to say this with confidence 

 respecting one of those architects ; and I have no doubt about it with 

 regard to the other, Mr. Ferrey. That case was a far more trying one 

 than Taunton, for the old Doncaster tower was much earlier in date and 

 absolutely faultless for its style ; indeed it was the well known beauty 

 of the tower which raised the wonderful subscription of nearly £40,000 

 for the rebuilding of the church, the rest of which was poor enough, as 

 everybody could perceive when the tower was no more. But for all 

 that, we ultimately determined to change the style in the new tower, 



