istg."! 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL. 



209 



hood to be set right; and who, in turn, sent him new questions to 

 answer. For this the learner paid fourpence a week. He likewise 

 in the night shifts mended the pitmen's clocks and watches, for 

 which he was paid, and cut out the pitmen's clothes. He further 

 taught cutting-out to the pitmen's wives; and to this day there are 

 some of them at Killingworth who work by his patterns. He 

 made shoes by the engine-fire, sometimes giving them to his poorer 

 kinsmen. Over the door of his house at Killingworth stands a 

 sundial, set up by himself, and to the last day of his life he was 

 proud of it. Not long before his death, while going over the line 

 of the Newcastle and Berwick Railway, he drew a professional 

 friend somewhat out of his way to have an admiring look at the 

 sundial. = " All this time he was deeply studying the steam-engine, 

 and exerting his mechanical ingenuity. Such a degree and variety 

 of mental labours is seldom gone through by the hardest student 

 in a college. 



Statues were voted to Stephenson by the northern railways as 

 already shown, and by the Grand Junction Railway Company, in 

 1816. Gibson is employed on the latter work. 



On his death, the greatest sympathy was shown throughout the 

 country by its representatives in the press. The notice of his 

 death in the railway newspapers and some of the provincial news- 

 papers appeared surrounded by a mourning border; and several 

 short memoirs appeared from the hands of those who had known 

 him. These have been here made use of. The Presidents of the 

 Institutions of Civil Engineers and of Practical Engineers like- 

 wise paid a public tribute to his merits. Before the latter an 

 eloge was read by Mr. Scott Russell. Robert Stephenson was cho- 

 sen to succeed him as President of the Institution of Mechanical 

 Engineers, held at Birmingham. Mr. Hudson, then presiding 

 over several railway meetings, expressed the sense the share- 

 holders felt of his loss. The Liverpool Board of the London and 

 North AVestern Railway passed a special resolution of condolence, 

 which they sent to his son. Lately, an engraving has been pub- 

 lished from the full-length portrait, by Mr. Lucas, representing 

 him standing on Chat Moss. Seldom was a man more honoured 

 in his life or on his death. 



Stephenson had been employed in France, Belgium, and Ger- 

 many, as well as at home, and had received great honours; only 

 it will be seen from the government of this country did he receive 

 no honours. It is perhaps enough thus to speak of the system 

 which, in all its bearings, so improperly performs the duties of 

 national gratitude towards men of learning and knowledge. The 

 Royal Engineers, as government proteges, are better looked after; 

 and Stephenson saw Drummond, Reid, Gipps, and Denison, with 

 many others, receive honours which the government had at its dis- 

 posal, but not for meritorious civilians. 



£9 Quoted by the writer of an interesUog sketch of Stepheason ia Eliza Cook's Jour, 

 nul. 



ARCHITECTURE,— ROYAL ACADEMY. 



[second notice.] 



Of designs for churches there are so many that they impart 

 somewhat too great a sameness of character to the assemblage of 

 drawings generally; more especially as they are one and all in the 

 Gothic style. Upon the whole, they justify Mr. Ruskin's remark 

 that there are now many who can show quite as much or even more 

 ability than Mr. Pugin, who, as far as he is at present distinguished 

 at all, is so only by his excessive affectation and pedantry. There 

 is one design of his, by-the-by, which we havg not yet spoken of — 

 viz.. No. 1057, which shows the tower and spire of St. George's 

 Catholic (Jhapel, Lambeth, as intended to be finished; in which as 

 a composition we can perceive no great merit or beauty, — and cer- 

 tainly should that portion of the structure be carried up to such a 

 preposterous height, it must have the effect of dwarfing the church 

 itself, and making the body of the building appear diminutive in 

 comparison with it. There seems, indeed, just now, to be quite a 

 rage for lofty spires; which, if not always disproportioned to the 

 structures themselves, are frequently so disproportioned to the 

 funds that the design suffers greatly in other respects, both ex- 

 ternally and internally. In fact, just as a portico used to be some 

 years ago, a spire is now made an ad captandum feature, and as 

 making full amends for whatever deficiencies there may be in re- 

 gard to all the rest. Thus, instead of a commodious and well 

 . finished-up structure being provided in the first instance, to which 

 a spire can be added at some future opportunity, — or should that 

 never be done, will still be satisfactory in itself, — an ostentatious 



spire is often attached to a small, and perhaps also mean-looking, 

 body, which can hardly be afterwards adequately improved, except 

 by taking down and rebuilding. "What can be worse," says Mr. 

 Talbot Bury (in Part II. of Architecture, in Weale's Rudimentary 

 Series) "than to see the body of a church shorn of all mouldings, 

 to lavish an unnecessary amount of enrichment on a tower?" Yet, 

 that is now frequently done, contrary perhaps in some cases to the 

 better judgment of the architects themselves, merely in compli- 

 ance with the want of judgment and one-sided notions, either of 

 committees who cannot be got at so as to be reasoned with, or 

 individual employers who will not listen to reason, or to any argu- 

 ments against their own whims. Some other remarks of Mr. Bury's 

 apply to several designs in the present exhibition, as when he tells 

 us that "the only requirement of an architect of the present day 

 (so far as the erection or restoring of churches is concerned), 

 seems to be a knowledge of the varieties of details of Gothic 

 buildings, which he is allowed to put together in any way he likes; 

 for according to the views of certain societies, they must of them- 

 selves produce a good building." Again, he observes: "The details 

 of cathedrals, royal chapels, palaces, and princely mansions, are 

 borrowed to disguise hospitals, schools, asylums, training colleges, 

 and even workhouses. This dishonesty in the expression of a 

 building, and the ignorant introduction or bad execution of use- 

 less ornament, seems to be (now) sanctioned by custom, and is 

 daily perpetrated: — -success stimulates the empiric to proceed in 

 his career, and the public taste becomes infected by his produc- 

 tions." 



Instances of the species of disguisement reprobated by Mr. 

 Bury are met with here: what at first sight show like lordly- 

 looking Elizabethan mansions, turn out to be intended for hospi- 

 tals, or other charitable institutions; while villas congregated to- 

 gether under the title of a "Terrace," are made to look very 

 much like a range of almshouses. On the other hand, colleges — 

 at least, training colleges, which might without impropriety be of 

 some importance with respect to mass, and to regularity of struc- 

 ture, are cut up into a series of low straggling parts, merely 

 tacked together, without the slightest regard to architectural 

 ensemble. Such productions might rather be called accidents than 

 designs, for the several parts — no single one of which, perhaps, has 

 much merit in itself — might be transposed' ad libitum, or tliey 

 might all be shaken up together, and scattered out afresh, and the 

 composition would be just as good as ever, if not better. It re- 

 quires no art to produce that sort of picturesqueness which is 

 almost sure to be occasioned by mere irregularity and incongruity; 

 it being no more than what' often shows itself very decidedly 

 where not the slijjhtest pretension is made to architecture, to de- 

 sign, or to artistic effect, but where, on the contrary, the several 

 parts and features taken by themselves are decidedly ugly. Yet, 

 that species of the picturesque ought to be left to the painter; it no 

 more belongs to the architect than does that which arises from 

 decay. Where we know that buildings have grown up piece-meal, 

 by fresh patches added to them from time to time, irregularity 

 does not offend; but to design a building so as to appear at the 

 very first only a mass of "shreds and patches" — and of architec 

 tural tatters, as some of the things we here behold, do, particu- 

 larly one design for a Training College, which requires to be 

 trained itself, — is not a little preposterous. 



By some it will be thought that our own pen requires to be res- 

 trained, for we have been indulging in a strain of general, yet not 

 quite uncalled-for remarks, instead of noticing or even pointing 

 out any designs in particular; although, were we gifted with the 

 same talent for expeditious criticism as some are, we might ere 

 this have passed in review the whole of the architectural subjects, 

 by merely extracting titles and names from the catalogue — as was 

 done, for instance, by the Illustrated News, — which mode of criti- 

 cism those readers who prefer it will there meet with. One of the 

 very few which deserve to be particularised for merit of design is 

 No. 1015, "The Private Chapel and Cemetery recently erected at 

 Carnsallock, Dumfries, for the late Right Hon. Sir Alexander 

 Johnston," E. B. Lamb, Regarded merely as a drawing, there 

 are others far more striking and captivating at first sight, being 

 set off by all the artifices and allurements of showy colouring, 

 staffage or figures, and pictorial effects. The structure itself, too, 

 IS but a small one, and the front of it here shown consists of very 

 little more than a doorway incorporated with a window over it, 

 and a gable, — the fewest and simplest features possible, yet which 

 are nevertheless made to produce a most happilv-conceived, and 

 happily-treated ensemble. Mr L. is evidently more ambitious of 

 setting precedents than of following them; and although that 

 would be presumptuous and unsafe in many, in him it is neither 

 the one nor the other; because he invariably displays far more 



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