40 
On Architectural Colouring. 
By Mr. T. Gamprer Parry. 
RT owes a greater debt to whitewash than it might 
like at first to avow. Whitewash preserved the portrait 
of Dante ‘to Italy, and the records of much ancient art to 
England. The Puritans’ whitewash was as good as a museum 
for the works it protected. But those works are now rapidly dis- 
appearing under the improving influences of restoration committees. 
It is difficult to detect the actual culprit of this ruthless destruction, 
because the builder employed in repairs shields himself behind the 
stupid ignorance of his men, the architect shelters himself behind 
the stupidity of the builder, and the ladies and gentlemen of the 
subscription list smile safely under the «gis of limited liability. 
There has been a variation of public taste. It has now gone from 
one bad thing to another—from whitewash to bare walls. Public 
taste began to wake to a sense of its own impurity, and then rushed 
into immoderate use of soap and water. The indiscriminate des- 
truction of early works of English art has been grievous. Much 
was bad, no doubt; but the good has gone with it, and, what is 
worse, the record of their composition, the incidents of their history, 
and the expression of their poetry, are gone also. There are, how- 
ever, scraps enough left to form for us the alphabet of restoration. 
No geological catastrophe has ever denuded a continent more com- 
pletely than the flood of modern Purism, under the lying name of 
Restoration, has laid bare the architecture of our ancestors. They 
have bared its very bones. No martyr was ever more effectually 
flayed. The finer taste of other days had covered the hideous 
mortar joints and rough masonry of the interior of buildings with 
a film of fine cement or gesso. But this has all been scraped away, 
under the ignorant supposition that that two was merely whitewash. 
The exteriors had been left rough by the builders, all fitly and 
