SKETCHES BY A PRACTISING ARCHITECT. 269 



enthusiastically of Palladio, he knew what he was 

 talking about. Sir, it was all fudge ! He talked 

 unwittingly — he knew not what. 



Your situation is now such as to afford a most 

 wholesome trial to your patience. Beware the " qui- 

 etus'' of a " bare bodkin ;" for the chances are you '11 

 be induced to think of using it, mindless of the " some- 

 thing after death ! " which poor Hamlet speaks of as 

 the support of" patient merit," under the " spurns of 

 the unworthy.'' However lofty may have been your 

 patron's wordy aspiring, he merely contemplated the 

 usual jog-trot horizontal course, as in a gig, and you 

 have taken him with you, as in the car of a balloon ; 

 — " Good God !" exclaims he, " where am I going? 

 Stop ! Stay ! Halloo !" It 's too late. The ropes 

 are cut. He insists on immediate descent. The gas 

 is too slow in escaping ; so, out with the parachute ; 

 and, if you escape with a whole neck, put up, at once, 

 your praises to heaven, and your Palladio upon your 

 book-shelf, there to be ready for your own occasi- 

 onal reference, but even to remain a dead letter to 

 Sir Anglo, whose talk and travels only serve to verify 

 the poet's couplet, — 



" How much a dunce tliat has been sent to roam, 

 Excels a dunce that has been kept at home.'* 



It is in this liability to be at once criticised by fo- 

 reign rule and compelled by home example, that the 

 young architect, finds, perhaps, his greatest plague, 

 vacillating between a wish to consult his patron's 

 professed admiration for works of standard merit, and 

 a desire to give some play to his own inventive power, 

 he produces even less than the " bastard issue" in- 

 tended : for the mushroom caprices of his employer, 

 springing with unexpected spontaneousness upon the 

 half grown creature of his divided care, smother his 

 functions in surmise, till " nothing is — but what is not, " 



So that, in truth, both parties may be equally 

 wrong. Sir Anglo, in his critical quackery ; and 



