1848.] 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECTS JOURNAL, 



355 



mUtake of the engraver, are made considerably more !" Nor is that 

 the finis with regard to mistakes, for the printer — or else Sotine 

 himself, committed many more, by " omitting by accident" the ex- 

 planations of the letters of reference in some of the plans. And 

 in their plans, or in what is dependent on and arises out of plans, 

 the chief, or, to speak more correctly, the sole merit of that collec- 

 tion of Soanean designs consists; many of the elevations being little 

 short of tlie downright ugly and hideous. Soane should have con- 

 fined himself to plan and contrivance : they were his forte. His 

 ground work was often truly admirable; his superstructure gene- 

 rally quite the reverse. The work of Soane's here referred to is 

 remarkable of its kind ; for, professing to show only " cottages, 

 villas, and other useful buildings," it includes a design for what 

 is neither a very cottage-like nor very utilitarian edifice, to wit, 

 a National Mausoleum. Soane seems to have had a pious penchant 

 for burying people : for the matter of that, he would not have 

 scrupled to bury the whcde nation alive, so that he had the erecting 



its mausoleum, or n!o».woleum, as terms it ; which last, I 



suppose, means nothing more nor less than a mouse-trap. 



IV. Pugin does not at all shine in the parliamentary " blue book" 

 which shows his design for Maynooth College, and those by dif- 

 ferent architects of some other public buildings that are now in 

 progress in Ireland. " Maynooth" would furnish an illustration 

 for Mr. P.'s own work entitled " Contrasts," it being a sufficiently 

 striking sample of pseudo-Gothic, alias modern Gothicising. It 

 is only Pugin's professed admirers — those who make it a point of 

 honour to admire whatever proceeds from him, who can look with 

 complacency on such a dowdy and prosaic design, which possesses 

 neither style, nor quality that atones for the dereliction of style. 

 Still it may, on that very account, prove not a little satisfactory 

 to some, — those, to wit, among his professional brethren who may 

 have taken oft'ence at Welby Pugin's supercilious tone towards 

 them in his " Contrasts" and other writings. Perhaps they will 

 retort upon him, and ask if Maynooth is to be regarded as an ex- 

 ample of what can be achieved by tliose who boast of being in- 

 spired by " the faith of our forefathers." 



V. Place axi.v dames ! A lady-writer on architecture is so great a 

 phenomenon — such a veritable black swan (applied to one of the 

 jair sex the simile sounds somewhat antithetical), that Mrs. Tuthill 



deserves to have a separate article, or at least an entire Fasciculus 

 devoted to her, more especially as she shows herself to be a reader 

 of Candidas, and has paid him the compliment of transferring to 

 her own pages one or two of his pithy i)aragraphs. Still 1 am not 

 so much indebted to her for the compliment, as she is to me for 

 those little bits of architectural philosophy which sparkle like 

 gems amid the dulness of her book, since she has not had the grace 

 to acknowledge to whom they belong. Inverted commas mark 

 them for quotations, and that is all; except it be that they are 

 jumbled up with extracts fi-om other writers, without the difference 

 of proprietorship being hinted at. Saum cuique, my good lady, is 

 an honest maxim, and the best policy ; for your own unscrupu- 

 lousness now relieves me from all scruples and qualms of gallantry, 

 and emboldens me to speak out somewhat freely. Privilege of 

 sex cannot be allowed you : you are of the feminine gender, — and 

 so are "man-of-war" ships ;" so also are amazons, but their she- 

 ship did not shield those belligerent ladies from wounds in the 

 brunt of battle. I do not deny you the right of wielding that 

 feminine implement the scissors ; but I do disapprove of your 

 making use of the paste-pot at the same time ; and your book is a 

 notable sample of that species of literary manufacture which goes 

 by the name of " scissors-aud-paste work." Perhaps you will say 

 that it is genuine patch-work, and, as such, is a very suitable occu- 

 pation for your sex. That a good deal has been ere now written upon 

 architecture by women I do not dispute ; but then, till now they 

 have invariably been old women, and of the man-kind, whereas you 

 are neither the one nor the other. " What then," you will say, 

 " may not ladies, who are not old ones, turn their attention to archi- 

 tecture? Why should they be interdicted from cultivatingataste for 

 that branch of fine art which has so much to do witii taste gene- 

 rally ?" Wliy, indeed, should they ? Architecture has, as you 

 observe, been strongly recommended in a paper in the '•'•Foreign 

 Quarterly" as a study particularly adapted to enter into the list 

 of female accomplishments ; and you might also have brought for- 

 ward Wightwick's opinion to the same effect. Nor do I dissent 

 from them : there certainly is nothing to hinder a woman from 

 understanding architecture— that is, the aesthetics of building, just 

 as well as a man, or indeed a great deal better than many men, 

 since some of them mistake mere building for architecture. Pro- 

 ficiency in the study is quite irrespective of sex : it depends upon 

 the intelligence, the application, and the relish brought to it. Sin- 



cerity of study, diligence of reflection, are the sine qua non : 

 whereas you seem to have overlooked some of the most indispen- 

 sable qualifications for the proper execution of the task which you 

 undertook ; and which, in the vastness of your ambition, you ex- 

 tended to every known style of the art, including some that no one 

 knows anything about at all. You appear to have set up for a 

 teacher, while you yourself were only a learner, and not very per- 

 fect in your lessons. You show that you have spoken by book and 

 by rote, feeling secure in, and trusting to, the greater ignorance 

 of your readers. Come, cheer up, my good i\Irs. Tutliill : though 

 you get no flattery from me, you may still get plenty of puff' from 

 other critics ; therefore the acidity of my remarks may be useful 

 to you, by correcting the fulsomeness of theirs. Considering — you 

 must excuse the ungraciousness of that qualifying expression, — -con- 

 sidering, I say, that it is the production of a female pen on a mas- 

 culine subject, your book is not so vei-y poor a book after all. At 

 all events, it is something in the bodily shape of a book — a goodly- 

 sized octavo volume, with your name on the title-page ; wliich is 

 far more than Candidus can boast of having ever sent forth to the 

 public. Yours is, besides, a funny book — funnier perhaps than 

 you intended it to be. One of its drolleries is that of omitting 

 in the list of those who have distinguished themselves in archite<»- 

 ture, such recent celebrities as Cagnola, Schinkel, Gartner, and 

 several others, and immortalising such obscurities as Joel Johnson, 

 and John Linnell Bond. Oh ! Mrs. Tuthill, Jlrs. Tuthill, you are 

 a very roguish creature ! To think of your immortalising — and 

 immortal tliey now will be in your book — such poor devils in all 

 their littleness, is no doubt very laughable, but partakes too much 

 of a mauvaise plaisanterie. 



VI. Loudon's " Architectural IMagazine," and others of his pub- 

 lications, have been very freely laid under contribution by Mrs. 

 Tuthill, who has copied several woodcuts from them, but without 

 any acknowledgment of their being copies, and without even men- 

 tioning the names of those by whom they were designed. At 

 p. 307, for instance, she has re-produced from the Supplement to 

 Loudon's " Encyclopaedia," what she very justly calls "a beautiful 

 English villa in the Blizaljethan style," and recommends as a model 

 for residences of that class in "tlie northern, middle, and western 

 states ;" but very ungraciously witliholds from Mr. E. B. Lamb the 

 credit of having designed it, although his name is attached to it 

 in the publication from wliich she pirated — or, to speak more pret- 

 tily — borrowed it. The suppression of its author's name is per- 

 haps less unjust than it otherwise would be, because she exhibits a 

 fac-simile of the original cut, with all tlie vexatious blunders which 

 Mr. L. complained of and pointed out in the letterpress accompany- 

 ing his design, observing, that owing to the ignorance of the en- 

 graver, " the parapet appears like a Grecian guilloche instead of Go- 

 thic perforated panelling ; the arches do not present the easy curve 

 of the Gothic four-centred arch; and the scroll label over the pro- 

 jecting bays assumes also a difl^erent character." Yet, notwithstand- 

 ing that these provoking infidelities of delineation were plainly 

 enough pointed out by the author of the design, they are not cor- 

 rected, neither is there a syllable of caution against them ; so that 

 the serious solecisms and errors in the cut may unwittingly be co- 

 pied together with the real merits of the design. Call you that 

 honesty, Mrs. Tuthill, — or can you fairly call yourself an honest 

 woman ? 



VII. " Simplicity of style in architecture," says Mrs. Tuthill — 

 Mrs. Tutliill again I^"is in itself a beauty." The dictum requires, 

 however, to be qualified by adding, provided the simplicity itself 

 be aesthetic, and accompanied by other aesthetic qualities. " A 

 Doric temple," she observes, " is perfectly simple ; yet what ob- 

 ject of art is more imposing and beautiful?" No doubt : the Greek 

 Doric temple was worked by refined and truly artistic simplicity, 

 and by perfect consistency and completeness of expression. The 

 difficulty is to infuse an equivalent degree of similarly-refined sim- 

 plicity into structures very difl'erently constituted, and which, there- 

 fore, ought to be stamped by appropriate character of their own. 

 Hardly can Mrs. T. mean to recommend the antique Doric temple 

 as a model at the present day, it being one which it is utterly im- 

 possible to adhere to. In fact, Greek temples are the stumbling- 

 block against which many American architects — of English ones I 

 say nothing — have tripped themselves up. A mere portico has gene- 

 rally been made by them their Alpha and Omega of design. They 

 have accordingly showed their classical taste and utter lack of inven- 

 tion by applying that convenient ready-made feature, the portico, 

 and tacking it ou to most Pecksniffian buildings, without the least 

 suspicion that they were thereby out-Pecksniffizing Pecksniff him- 

 self. Mrs. T.'s own book gives us a sample of the kind at page 300, 

 assuring us that " the beautiful portico is copied from the Erech- 



46* 



