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my most grateful thanks for the very kind manner in which you 
have been good enough to receive the vote which has been put to 
you. Before I address the few sentences which will have reference 
to that point, I should like to say just a word in reply to the 
observations that have fallen from Mr. Russell. Now, Mr. Russell 
has divided the parties to this controversy into three sections. He 
said there are—first, those who would not have any restoration at 
all ; then, those who wish to restore the buildings as far as possible 
to their original condition; and then those who would only keep 
the good and reject the bad. He places me in the last category. 
And then he said, as has been said before by some of the highly 
instructed persons to whom I have referred, that it was a matter of 
great difficulty to decide what was good and what bad. Now, I 
am afraid I did not make myself sufficiently clear on that particular 
point ; therefore I will repeat myself,—because I quite understand 
the difficulty Mr. Russell has found and others find in this 
particular matter. But I said before, and I repeat it now, that the 
question of What is good? is a relative term; and I comprise 
within the term of “ What is good” everything that has ever been 
executed by individual artists from the earliest times until now. 
Anything, for example, there is of Saxon ornament, or Saxon 
architecture, should not be destroyed: I would keep it; because 
it has an individual character. 
If you go to St. Bees, you will find there, amongst the few 
things that remain at St. Bees Church (most of the older have 
disappeared), but among the few things that remain, there is a very 
curious, ancient doorway, quite of the early part of the twelfth 
century. That you cannot call a work of art; but it is a curiosity; 
and that being the work of an individual artist and the expression 
of a particular time—that is a thing I would not, under any 
circumstances, sweep away, any more than I would sweep away 
what I consider to be an excellent work of art of its class—the 
pulpit of St. James’ Church, Whitehaven. ‘That is a thing that 
ought not to be swept away; for it is the expression of an 
individual artist and a particular time. The very stalls of Gibbons, 
which Sir Gilbert Scott was proposing to take away out of Canter- 
