1849.] 



TPIE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL. 



161 



MALLEABLE IRON LATTICE BRIDGE. 



By C. E. A. Blair. 



{With an Engraving, Plate IX.) 



The bridge is proposed to be constructed of malleable iron 

 throughout. The top and bottom of the main girders are com- 

 posed of plates rivetted together, with covering plates at the 

 joints. The sides are formed of strip iron, Scinch by i-inch, with 

 a single rivet at each intersection. The advantages of tliis prin- 

 ciple of construction are that the largest spans may be crossed with 

 the minimum headway, the distance from underside of girder 

 to level of rails being reduced to 2 ft. 2 in. The saving of expense 

 in cuttings and embankments would necessarily be greatly less- 

 ened, inasmuch as the greatest height required from surface of 

 ground to rail level would be about 21 feet. 



The sectional area of the bottom flanche is to the sectional ai-ea 

 of the top as 6 to 7, and the breaking weight in the centre is taken 

 at 6 tons per foot of the span. 



Bridges on this principle of construction (not exceeding 80 feet 

 span) may be erected at 40/. per yard forward, or about 19/. per 

 ton, including all details. 



For extensions of existing railways this plan is very advantage- 

 ous, as the works can be executed with great rapidity and with 

 perfect success. Bridges on this principle have been erected by 

 Mr. Hawkshaw on the Lancashire and York Railway. 



Manchester, March 21, 1849. 



CANDIDUS'S NOTE-BOOK, 

 FASCICULUS XCIV. 



" I must liave liberty 

 Withal, as Urge a charter as the wiuds. 

 To blow on whom I please." 



I. How far the "Seven Lamps" are likely to enlighten the 

 public on the subject of architecture may be better judged by-and- 

 by. It is not every one whom they will enable to see his way 

 much better than at present; nor is it every one who will thank 

 the Lamplighter, — so far from it that some of his opinions and ut- 

 terings will seriously offend many. I'ugin and his party will say 

 that his book truly resembles a lamp in one respect — namely, in 

 being a wick-ed thing, for it denounces the Romanist Church in 

 unqualified terms of abhorrence as being "in the fullest sense anti- 

 christian." "Our detestable Perpendicular" is an expression that 

 will not be at all relished by Mr. Barry, and the commissioners for 

 rebuilding the Palace of Westminster. Mr. Pickett will feel 

 sadly agrieved by what is urged against the employment of Iron 

 as "a constructive material," and against cast-iron ornaments. 

 The protest against Machine-Carving, as being not only bad but 

 "dishonest also," will be equally unpleasant to others. "Do not 

 let us talk of Restoration," will scandalise not a few among us. 

 And, "we shall not manufacture Art out of Pottery and Printed 

 Stuifs," will scandalise quite as many of a different class. In 

 another quarter, our Lamplighter's aversion to Railroads and Rail- 

 way travelling, and his advice that no more money should be 

 expended on Stations and other railway buildings, will not obtain 

 him friends. His condemnation of Heraldic decorations, "its 

 similitudes and arrangements being so professedly and pointedly 

 unnatural that it would be difficult to invent anything uglier," will 

 cause some to make such wry faces that they themselves will look 

 as ugly as the ugliest heraldic images. Similar workings of the 

 human countenance will again be produced by his deprecating and 

 depreciating "rigid imitations of mediaeval statuary," which he 

 affirms to be "mere insults to common sense, and only unfit us for 

 feeling the nobility of their prototypes." His severe reprehension 

 of cheap churches, and cheap architecture generally, and of the 

 piesent "that-'ll-do" system, will not at all ingratiate him with 

 jobbers and "speculative" builders. Putting all this and a great 

 deal more besides together, it will be well if his "Seven Lamps" 

 do not prove to be seven mischievous Fiiebrands, that will singe 

 and scorch numbers of folks, both those in the profession and out 

 of it. 



II. There is, indeed, one in the profession who, so far from being 

 at all singed or scorched, is on the contrary absolutely irradiated, 

 — at any rate, one of his buildings is set in a most luminous light; 

 for the 0.xford Graduate scruples not to express his "sincere admi- 

 ration of the very noble entrance and general architecture of — " 



No. 141.— Vol. XII.— June, 1849. 



of what will hardly be guessed even when the reader is informed 

 that it is one of our metropolitan structures — the British Museum. 

 However sincere Mr. Ruskin's admiration may be, it is by far too 

 laconic to be of any particular value, or to amount to more than a 

 bare opinion unsupported by a single remark in evidence of its 

 justness. Yet, some special remarks were certainly required, since 

 the praise accorded to that edifice seems to be in flat contradiction 

 to much that he elsewhere says. Besides that, the general bare- 

 ness of the facade and its utter destitution of ornament would 

 seem to do anything but recommend it to one who shows that he 

 has a taste for even the most profuse decoration; the fa'.ade itself is 

 but a mask, and one so awkwardly put on 'that it does not even 

 conceal the meanness of the general structure behind it. Among 

 other remarks of the same tendency, "it is not well," he says, 

 "that ornament should cease in the parts concealed; credit is given 

 for it, and it should not be deceptively withdrawn; as, for instance, 

 in the backs of the statues in a temple pediment." It.isum teneutis? 

 — here is a gentlemen so over-scrupulous on the score of honesty 

 and probity of work and workmanship, that he would have parts 

 that can never, while the building remains in an entire state, be 

 seen at all, be carefully finished up, yet can conveniently shut his 

 eyes to the gross inconsistency and palpable wholesale deformity 

 occasioned by its being seen that the stone Ionic facade is merely 

 "a show-front" stuck on to a brick building of very homely and 

 warehouse-like character, to say nothing of the paltry bits be- 

 tween the main building and the official houses. Mr. Ruskin 

 surely reminds us of the giant who could swallow mill-stones 

 with ease, yet was at last choked by a pound of butter. 



III. It is not generally known, perhaps, that the Oxford Gra- 

 duate is the same person as the Kata Phuxin of Loudon's "Archi- 

 tectural Magazine," a clever but fanciful, and frequently so mys- 

 tical a writer, that if he does not actually lose himself in his 

 darkly-expressed sayings, his meaning is both mist to and missed 

 by the generality of readers. An eighth lamp is required to throw 

 light on some of his enigmatical expressions and phrases — such, 

 for instance, as '■^Parasitical iHubliniity," which, by the rule of ob- 

 scurum per obscurius, he gives as tlie definition or explanation of 

 the term "Picturesque." And he afterwards goes on to say, '■^The 

 picturesque is developed distinctively c.ructhj in proportion to the dis- 

 tance from the centre of thought of those points of character in which 

 the sublimity is found;" — to make out the meaning of which far 

 exceeds my comprehension. 



IV. Passing from Mr. Ruskin's ambitious sublimities and eccen- 

 tricities of language, and following liim where he is more intelli- 

 gible, even there we occasionally find him startlingly eccentric in 

 some of his critical opinions. And after his profession of sincere 

 admiration for the British Museum — which, by the by, might have 

 been referred to by him as a notable instance of that "formalised 

 deformitv, shrivelled precision, and starved accuracy" with which 

 he reproaches his own countrymen — startling it is to hear him 

 descant with enthusiastic rapture on the Doge's Palace, the Cam- 

 panile, and front of St. Mark's, at Venice, as "models of perfec- 

 tion." Of the last-mentioned he says, that "although in many 

 respects imperfect, it is in its proportions, and as a piece of rich 

 and fantastic colour, as lovely a dream as ever filled human imagi- 

 nation" ! What will the Parthenonites, — or what will the de- 

 votees of our o« n mediseval styles, say to that flotirish ? Certain 

 it is that the ^^Lamjis" here afford us some entirely new light, for 

 never before, as far as I am aware, have any of those three struc- 

 tures been spoken of otherwise than as architectural singularities 

 <ind grotesques, — as such, curious and interesting enough, but 

 devoid of any element of beauty. Mr. Ruskin himself does not 

 attempt to conceal from his readers tliat the general opinion 

 hitherto entertained of them has been the reverse of favourable. 

 Like myself, he is not one of those who speak by book, and merely 

 re-echo' or repeat drowsily by rote stereotyped praise or censure. 

 On the contrary, witli a manly candour w Inch is much more rare 

 than it ought ti) be, he quotes' the summary condemnation passed 

 by a professional critic on those three works of architecture. 

 Woods says of them : "The strange-looking church, and the 

 great ugly campanile, could not be mistaken. The exterior of 

 this church surprises you by its extreme ugliness more than by 

 anything else. The Ducal Palace is even more ugly than anytliinfj 

 I iiave previously mentioned;" — whereas he of the "Lamps" 

 speaks of the last as "the model of all perfection," — an opinion 

 as marvellous as any of the wonders wrought by Aladdin's lamp. 

 Pity that we did not get it before, because then, perhaps, we 

 should have had a copy of the Doge's Palace for the Army 

 and Navy Clubhouse. However, we may still have it for some- 

 thing else, now that we are enlighteueii as to its extraordinary 

 merits. 



23 



