44 Mr. E. B, Dcnison, [Feb. 11, 



I have reason to believe that the great Doncaster cliurch is the first 

 modern building in which the windows have been set as far back as 

 half the thickness of the wall, or from 18 inches in the thinnest walls 

 to 2^ feet in the thickest. Those in St. James*s Church and in the 

 tower of St. George's are deeper still ; for the upper windows of the 

 tower were altered to 3 feet deep, and all the windows in St. James's 

 are set nearer to the inside than the outside of the walls, so that none 

 are less than 20 inches deep ; and the east window, though it is of 

 course smaller than St. George's, has the same depth, 2 ft. 6 in. outside. 

 I promised not to prove anything this evening, and therefore I 

 abstain from giving the reasons why external depth of windows must 

 be of far more architectural value than internal, especially as I have 

 done so at some length elsewhere,* and exposed the common excuses of 

 the architects for the contrary practice. I shall only say here, as a 

 matter of fact, that everybody, so far as I can learn, admires St. 

 George's Church for its superiority to other modern buildings in this 

 respect, and the St. James's windows for their superiority to many in 

 St. George's, both in depth of setting and in massiveness, though they 

 are much plainer in the mouldings and in the general design. Mr. 

 Scott was afraid that people would be disappointed at finding the depth 

 of these windows inside no greater than it usually is in walls of the 

 common thickness, after seeing that it is just a foot more outside, and 

 that it would be considered a kind of cheat. For anything I know, 

 the architect of the 19th century, who always puts his windows at least 

 twice as near the outside as the inside of the wall, may think it his 

 duty to be disappointed ; but nobody else is : on the contrary, I have 

 heard more admiration generally expressed after people have seen the 

 inside of the church than before, even when their attention has been 

 directed to this peculiarity of the windows — for modern ones ; which 

 is only one amongst the many proofs we have had there, that as soon 

 as the right thing is done, it is generally acknowledged to be right, 

 however little the necessity for it may have been appreciated beforehand. 



But you must not imagine that it is only in the windows that mo- 

 dern^ Gothic architecture suffers from want of visible depth. It is 

 equally true of doorways, buttresses, corbels, arch-mouldings, cornices, 

 eaves of roofs ; everywhere, in short, where it is possible to give the 

 building a sort of meagre, shaven, eyebrowless look, precisely the 

 opposite of that which is eminently characteristic of all the buildings of 

 the three great Gothic centuries, and hardly perished even in the fourth. 

 The principal expense we were put to in altering work already done in 

 both churches at Doncaster arose from the necessity for correcting (as far 

 as could be done) the stupid and perverse shaving down and cropping 

 of projections and reducing of depths by the clerks who made the work- 

 ing drawings of things which had actually been right in the original 

 pictures : just what you see Mr. Garbett complains of at "Westminster 



♦ See pp. 79, &c., of the 2nd edition of Lectures on Churchhuilding^ and p. 33 of 

 the other lectures at Doncaster. 



