1859.] on Modern Gothic Architecture. 47 



English and certainly more useful one of length. I should say of 

 height, as of ornamentation, of course it is a valuable element of 

 architectural effect, but it ought to come last, not first ; and I will add, 

 as ray own opinion, that it ought very seldom indeed to be the leading 

 characteristic of a large building; for when it is, it is extremely likely 

 to destroy that character which everybody understands by the term 

 Repose, and for which our own long cathedrals seem distinguished 

 above all others in the world. Some of them are undoubtedly too 

 low ; but too low for their breadth, not their length ; and with our 

 usual discrimination and good taste, breadth is the dimension into 

 which we almost invariably expand now when size is wanted ; and 

 thus the length is doubly overpowered. I am sorry to have to say that 

 it is plain to my mind, that this consequence of raising the roof of this 

 St. George's Church 20 feet (in itself a vast improvement) besides the 

 widening the nave (which was necessary) was overlooked in fixing the 

 length ; and that the ground plans of some other churches, which were 

 produced to prove that the present proportions would turn out right, 

 proved nothing of the kind ; because they are none of them so high. 

 If you look at any good pictures of the old and new churches together, 

 with the information that the clearstory walls are of just the same 

 height in both, and therefore by no means of that exaggerated propor- 

 tion which is affected in Gordon Square and Margaret Street, you 

 would never imagine that the new church is 16 feet longer inside than 

 the old one, and still more outside. The old church looked a long 

 one, and yet did not look too low ; the new one, everybody observes, 

 is too short for its other dimensions ; and there is scarcely a modern 

 Gothic church anywhere, which is not, especially if height has been 

 aimed at. 



A still worse fault of the same family is the passion for building 

 high spires on bases about half as wide as the old ones. This vile prac- 

 tice seems to me to concentrate all the bad taste, and pretension, and 

 ignorance of proportion, which will be recorded some day as the 

 characteristic of this age. The architects profess to be reviving the 

 architecture of the 13th or 14th centuries ~" taking that as their 

 starting point" for further development ; and yet they seem to have dis- 

 covered that the builders of Salisbury, and Norwich, and Grantham, and 

 Coventry, and Louth, and Newark, and Lincoln, and Ely, and old Don- 

 caster, and all the towers of the west, knew nothing of their business, and 

 of the proper width for a tower in proportion to its height. To be sure, 

 we need hardly speak of towers, because now-a-days nobody is satisfied 

 without a spire, and the spire must be higher than some other in the 

 neighbourhood ; and as for its width, it may be anything the architect 

 likes : probably they think (if they think about it at all) the narrower 

 it is the taller it will look, and certainly the cheaper it will be. And 

 so has grown up the plan of putting the steeple over an aisle, instead 

 of the nave, or making a narrow transept on purpose for it, as in the 

 rebuilt parish church at Leeds, or putting it anywhere else where it 

 can escape the necessity for being as wide as the nave, as the old towers 

 almost invariably are where they aim at any considerable height, even 



