SKETCHES BY A PRACTISING ARCHITECT. 267 



goodly fabrics of houses, for beauty only, to the 

 enchanted palaces of the poets, who built them with 

 small cost J" 



Such is precisely the veering weathercock argu- 

 ment of the thousand classic votarists, here repre- 

 sented by our one delectable Sir Anglo. A weak 

 breath of affiscted or thoughtless admiration for 

 Italian art keeps the vane poetic-ward, till a strong 

 blast from the more truly constituted quarter of his 

 mind, suddenly whisks to the right about, and it 

 stands fixed pocket-ward. Nor is its latter direction, 

 of necessity, wrong ; for, if the means of pecuniary 

 supply be really wanting, the architect and his patron 

 would be equally wanting in honesty, should they 

 incur the heavy consequences of decorative expense. 

 The error is, in falsely attributing the splendours of 

 the Vicentine Palace, to any now unattainable super- 

 iority in its architect. At the least, we can exactly 

 copy the lauded example, and it should go hardly 

 with us if we could not improve upon it. The art is 

 not so subtle in its nature as to baffle modern scruti- 

 ny : on the contrary, it partakes so much of science, 

 that improvement is almost the necessary concomitant 

 of progressing time. One improvement has, at all 

 events, been brought into action, viz. a very reason- 

 able reluctance to enter upon schemes too costly for 

 perfect completion, or upon such as in that comple- 

 tion leave their projectors to feed upon the retrospect 

 of having advanced an architect's fame by the ruin 

 or discomforting reduction of their family fortune. 

 Half the palaces of the Vicentine nobility are unfi- 

 nished. Their proprietors, in effecting that half, 

 exhausted their means, and left their children to 

 market parsimoniously and to garnish their humbled 

 fare with the talk of "il nostro Palladio." If Sir 

 Anglo will do the same, he will assuredly find il sno 

 Palladio. If John Bull will chanpe his beef and 

 plum-puddinji for a crust fnid butter, he shall have 

 Corinthian cohimns where he has at present only a 

 plain brick wall ; or, to nmko a nioK^ roa-onnljlo 



