32 , Mi\ E, B. Denison, [Feb. 11, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, February 11, 1859. 



William Robert Grove, Esq. M.A. Q.C. F.R.S Vice-President, 



in the Chair. 



Edmund Beckett Denison, Esq. M.A. Q.C. M.R.I. 



On some of the Grounds of Dissatisfaction with Modern Gothic 

 Architecture.* 



It is an odd coincidence that the House of Commons has already been 

 engaged this evening in listening to some lectures on the same subject 

 as we are going to consider here. For Lord Palmerston, Sir Benjamin 

 Hall, and a few other gentlemen, have been expressing their dissatis- 

 faction with Gothic architecture, and assuring the House that it is 

 essentially gloomy, awkward, barbarous, expensive, and altogether in- 

 capable of meeting the wants of this enlightened age, and the clerks 

 of the Foreign Office. One would almost fancy that we were put 

 back a couple of centuries, and listening again to the kind of descrip- 

 tion which used to be given of the Gothic style by the leaders of 

 the public taste in the days of the Restoration, when all Gothic art 

 was supposed to be dead and buried far too deep for any chance of 

 revival. This is the character which the once celebrated John Evelyn, 

 who was one of the Commissioners for rebuilding St. Paul's cathedral, 

 gave in his treatise On Architecture and Architects to the style of all 

 the great cathedrals of the world except his own and its prototype at 

 Rome. He calls it ' a certain fantastical and licentious manner of 



* building, introduced by the Goths and Vandals and other barbarous 



* nations, who demolished the glorious Roman empire with its stately 



* I do not see how to comply with the numerous applications I have had for a 

 report of this lecture, except by writing a fuller version of it than the usual abstract ; 

 for an abstract of a lecture on a subject of this kind would be almost unreadable, 

 and therefore of no use. As it was not written beforehand, and I do not profess to 

 remember accurately what I said, I can only use the notes from which it was given 

 as an outline to be filled up, as if I were writing the lecture for delivery. So 

 long as it is substantially the same, it cannot signify to anybody who heard — or did 

 not hear it, whether the words are identical or not. In some parts they certainly 

 are not, because I was obliged to hurry over some branches of the subject for fear 

 of exceeding the usual time unreasonably. Of course the Royal Institution is not 

 responsible for my opinions ; and it must be remembered that Architecture is in 

 these days an eminently controversial subject. — E. B. D. 



