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



in their museum, and every Gothic building in the world testifies 

 against them. 



They may possibly, in the vain hope of finding some ex post facto 

 excuse for the practice which they adopt for no real reason, but from 

 an ignorant acquiescence in the Italian spirit which yet infests a great 

 deal of pretended Gothic, ask whether I mean to prohibit the polish- 

 ing of marble ; and if I do, how its proper effect is to be brought out. 

 Of course I do not : and for this simple reason. Marble does owe its 

 effect to polish, and therefore polishing is proper for it.* In this 

 respect it is precisely opposite to stone- work ; for the variegation of 

 surface and the colour of marble do not come out till it is polished ; 

 whereas the smoothing or regular working of stone work, and the point- 

 ing up of joints, or any formal working of them, destroys the variety of 

 surface, (except in the one case which I have mentioned, and which is 

 so far like marble,) and brings it all to a dull and dead monotony which 

 would spoil the best Gothic building in the world. The artists who 

 make the picturesque views of intended buildings for the architects are 

 perfectly aware of this, and take as much care to avoid all appearance 

 of uniformity of surface and precision of details, as the architects them- 

 selves, or the builders who work to their taste and approval, take after- 

 wards to obtain it : another instance of the fallacy of architectural 

 drawings. In the days when everybody's views of grand architecture 

 were like Lord Palmerston's, even the drawers of the old cathedrals 

 thought it necessary to present them in as much of a classical dress as 

 they could without altering their form ; and if you look at any of those 

 pictures you will see how completely they are ungothicised, simply by 

 this artifice of giving a classical face to the walls, and marking out the 

 stones into regular patterns. Many of the prints in modern architec- 

 tural books have the same fault, though in a less degree ; and if you 

 can find the same thing drawn in the smooth and prim style in one of 

 these books, and truly drawn in Britton's Cathedrals or Antiquities 

 (for he knew better than to improve upon the Gothic he was copying), 

 you will almost doubt whether it is the same, so different does it look 

 with a Gothic surface, and an Italian one. And do not let the archi- 

 tects delude you with the nonsense that this roughness is the effect of 

 age. That you may dispose of in a moment by the first old building 

 you can find (and there are plenty) in which the tool-marks remain 

 visible. Moreover age without absolute decay cannot alter the forms 

 and sizes of ornaments or mouldings, or make things irregular and 

 various which were once precise and uniform. And still further, you 

 will find that the flat and monotonous modern work never acquires the 

 variety of the old even where the stone is already perished, and is 

 therefore older in effect than old stone work which has not perished. 



* Nevertheless, I have used marble unpolished, and should do so again, for a 

 monumental slab set against a wall ; the effect is certainly better than of the usual 

 polished ones, though the case is different where the marble is expressly used far 

 ornament and colour. 



