143 
Beckett said: ‘The work of restoration” (he was alluding to 
St. Alban’s Cathedral) ‘cannot be done without a great deal of 
actual rebuilding and imitating old work as well as we can, which 
I boldly avow is the proper mode of restoring work which is 
partially decayed, so that the old and new may look continuous 
and complete. I utterly deride all the nonsense that is talked 
about the baseness of imitation and copying, In such cases it is 
the only proper mode of restoration.” 
Now, to begin with, you will perceive Sir Edmund Beckett 
denies you can settle by any principle ‘what is good.” Any 
attempt to do so he says is “foolish.” But I differ from him, and 
I think I can state a principle which will stand any test that 
common sense can reasonably suggest. It may be difficult, no 
_ doubt, in any high condition of refinement, either of art or manu- 
facture, to lay down dogmatically “what is good” or otherwise; 
but when an art is either lost, or has fallen to the depths of 
degradation to which architecture and decoration have descended 
in our time—not only in England, but all over Europe; when our 
churches are daily dealt with after the manner of Salisbury 
Cathedral, and our domestic buildings decorated in the fashion 
lately adopted at the Carlton Club ; when we consider the “fiasco” 
of the late Exhibition of Paris as regards original productions, 
then “what is good” becomes a relative rather than a positive 
term, and may be fairly held to apply not to the labour of common 
workmen, but to “every original work of every individual artist” 
from the earliest time down to the present day. This is the prin- 
ciple which I endeavoured to assert at the meeting of the R.ILB.A., 
and to illustrate by a reference to the case of the Canterbury stalls, 
already explained toyou. And now I submit with some confidence 
that this principle, approved as-it was in the main by both Mr. 
Street and Mr. Poynter, is not foolish, but sensible. The most 
important proposition laid down by Sir Edmund Beckett, and 
most germane to the subject before us, is, however, really contained 
in the last paragraph which I have quoted from his speech, where 
he says, “The proper mode of restoring work partially decayed is 
by imitating the old work as well as we can, so that the old and 
