.266 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AD ARCHITECTS JOURNAL. 



[Skpt. 



Conyenience!— no doubt George the Fourth studied his own convenience, 

 and had he inhabited the Palace, might, perhaps, have been perfectly 

 satisfied with it; yet the public would not have been at all better satisfied 

 with the building uu that account. And surely, when palaces are built or 

 altered, the public, who provide the money, may very reasonably expect- 

 nay, may rightly demand that the structure shall be made a worthy public 

 ornament, and be, as a work of architecture, of a much higher grade than 

 usual. Extravagance is not to be measured by the ordinary shop-keepiug 

 standard of mere cost, because there is far more extravagance inlaying 

 out a hundred thousand pounds on things we are afterwards ashamed of, 

 than in expending a million upon what we should have reason to be proud 

 of, as a people. Don't let us have to pay both money and reputation loo, 

 as we have so often done hitherto. We do not recollect to have ever 

 seen mentioned what was the approximating estimate for Jones'sWhitehall, 

 but enough to have erected two such vast piles has since been flung away 



not, indeed, all at once in a lump, but in hundreds of thousands, or so, at 



a lime, in building up, altering, botching up, and in some cases, unbuilding 

 again. Could we but ascertain the exact amount of aggregate cost of the 

 quondam Gothic palace at Kew, the Pavilion at Brighton, Carlton House, 

 the present Buckingham Palace, up to the time of the additions now mak- 

 ing to it, including some of our government buildings, the total would be 

 most startling ; and most grievous, too, would be the reflection that there 

 was never any thing at all adequate got in return for it,— which after all 

 is the real grievance. 



Whether the public generally will now be satisfied with the Palace, we 

 pretend not to say ; we only know that we are not so ourselves,— quite the 

 contrary, for if there be improvement at all, it certainly falls very far short 

 indeed of such as there might have been. Instead of extending our re- 

 marks at present, we leave our readers to decide how far those which we 

 have made are justified by the elevation itself, in which we think they 

 must be struck, if by nothing else, by the excessive meanness of the state 

 entrance through the centre. That archway is quite dumpy in its propor- 

 tions, as compared with the other two, and looks all the more so in conse- 

 quence of the very difl'erently proportioned square-headed passages on its 

 sides. Neither has the architect there provided places for the sentinels, as 

 he might have done, making them both very characteristic and very orna- 

 mental features in the building itself, but has left it to the carpenter to put 

 a couple of pallry wooden sentry-boxes to the principal entrance to a royal 

 palace. 



According to the scale on the drawing, the whole length of the fajade 

 is 350 feet; and height to the top of parapet of the wings 77 feet, and of 

 the centre 84 feel, or to the top of the centre ornament, 100 feet. 



CANDIDUS'S NOTE-BOOK. 

 FASCICULUS LXXIII. 



*' I must have liberty 

 Withal, as large a charter as the winds, 

 To blow on whom I please." 



I. There are some others, it seems, quite as free in opinion, and as 

 audacious in speaking it out, as myself. In an article in the " British 

 Quarterly," entitled " Modern Painters and Architects," the writer says : 

 " If a truly absurd spire is wanted, we must go the length of Fleet-street, 

 where the stone pagoda dedicated to St. Bride has won the indiscriminate 

 praise of ignorance for a century past. A thing without thought, inven- 

 tion, grace, or any property of mind ; but reared as a child docs its castle 

 of cards, story above story in monotonous succession— just as many as it 

 will bear." Nor is this all, for it is added in a foot-note below : " Christ's 

 church, Newgate-street, with less monotony than St. Bride's, is a still 

 worse specimen of St. Christopher Wren's belfreys." The writer has, 

 however, the grace — which I have not — to admit that Bow steeple is " a 

 singularly beautiful specimen" of the kind. For " singularly," read 

 "comparatively beautiful," and the praise becomes just. — After all, a 

 steeple does not constitute an entire church, and whatever their steeples 

 may be, the bodies of M'ren's churches are so far from possessing any 

 beauty, as to be absolutely uncouth, and utterly negative as to style, al- 

 though all decidedly partake of one and the same manner. The excuse 

 may be that most of them are in such confined situations, so blocked up by 



gurrouDding bouses, that very little of the general exteriors can be seen ; 

 wherefore to have studied beauty for them would have been study thrown 

 away. The deformity of St. James's, Piccadilly, however, cannot be ex- 

 cused by any such extenuating plea, — and even those who profess to dis- 

 cern such rare beauty and excellence in the interior, are obliged to admit 

 that the exterior is ugly, — not merely a plain, homely structure, for which 

 no architectural pretension is made, but decidedly ugly and a positively 

 disagreeable object. The design is that of a mere builder — or else of a 

 churchwarden, 



II. That same roaster churchwarden reminds me of one thing : speak- 

 ing of the present " orthodox movement" in church building, it is observed 

 in the article above quoted, that " Ignorant churchwardens no longer go 

 about with their pail of whitewash, beautifying, retrenching, and destroy- 

 ing, according to their notions of taste. Architecture has little that is 

 really valuable, however, to hope for from this ecclesiastical movement, 

 beyond the conservation of what already exists. A spirit of veneration 

 that banishes all thought of originality, and all hope of progress, is the ut- 

 most that it confers. When it has exhausted its models in the pitiful work 

 of imitative production, what then? — the enfeebled emasculated copyist 

 can only retrograde." — Bravo, " British" .' Your prediction is in a fair 

 way of being speedily verified. Even the very best of our recent Gothic 

 bears that sort of resemblance to genuine productions of Gothic art during 

 the period of its vitality, which wax-work does to life. At the first glance, 

 the resemblance may be deceptive, but at the next we perceive the thing 

 itself to be a mere semblance, devoid of the living breath of art, — a mere 

 puppet skilfully put together to amuse ecclesiological and antiquarian 

 bigots. Alas! for architecture in such hands and under such influences'- 

 While unable to comprehend art, — and at the bottom they are just as mat- 

 ter-of-fact in their ideas as churchwardens, the dilTerence being that their 

 matter-of-fact is of a dilTerent and more book-learned kind, — such pro- 

 tectors befriend architecture just as the man in the fable did the horse 

 when it applied to him for assistance, namely, by clapping a saddle on its 

 back and putting a bridle into its mouth. Thus far shall thou go, say 

 they to architecture, and no further, this way and no other, for it is this way 

 which we know ; for it has been formed for us by " our forefathers," and 

 we have duly mapped it out by studying chronicles and precedents. Were 

 we to suffer you to get off from the beaten road, we should of a certainty 

 lose ourselves at once, and what few wits we have would desert us en- 

 tirely. 



III. I must be allowed to help myself to another slice of the " British." 

 The writer reproaches the " Oxford divine" ! as he calls Mr. Parker, for 

 his total exclusion of Elizabethan architecture from his otherwise ample 

 " Glossary," observing that such exclusion " is a sample of the very partial 

 views that still prevail on all the great principles referring to art. The 

 Elizabethan, forsooth, is no style at all, but a meie corruption of the ortho- 

 dox models that our modern Camdenists worship. In its origin, we admit, 

 it was so, just as the Norman style was the offspring of the corrupt Roman ; 

 not altogether in either case, however, by ignorant corruption, but by an 

 adaptation of old architecture to new habits and the wants of the age, — 

 the legitimate source of all architecture." — Precious words those last: if 

 architecture has now become incapable of accommodating itself to the 

 ideas, the habits, and the wants of our times, it must be regarded as effete ; 

 or if it does not do so merely because it is not permitted, it must be regard- 

 ed as enslaved, — degraded to the servile and humiliating oflice of building 

 according to pattern. " But so little is this idea of adaptation of style lo 

 purpose understood," — I am again quoting from the "British," — " that within 

 the brief period of a dozen years, we have seen this same Elizabethan style 

 proposed by a carefully-selected committee of taste, as one of the two alone 

 fit fur the halls of legislature, and rejected in the best architectural glossary 

 that exists, as no style at all I It is characteristic of the class which the 

 latter may be considered as representing, that it is not the architecture 

 a^nc of the I3lh and 14th centuries which they thus exclusively seek to 

 restore. They are the same reformers who aim at the improvement of the 

 people in the 19th century, by the revival of the maypole, and the manners 

 of ' the good old times ;' a spirit that has no onward nor upward gaze • 

 whose golden age lies in the past, and not in the future." Good old times 

 with a vengeance, were those same times of " our forefathers" — to make 

 use of a canting expression — times no! deficient in examples of heroic virtue 

 but also marked by the most atrocious crimes, — times of spiritual, if not of 

 intellectual dsirkness, — times whose vaunted piety was composed of arro- 



