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THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECTS JOURNAL. 



[Oct. 



and can bear testimony to the truth of this assertion. It is a pity that the 

 family of this eminent architect do not permit some competent person of 

 leisure and talent to publish some of the choicest of their father's works, 

 the size of the " Vitruvius Brittannicus," for the use of the architectural 

 •tudents of the present day. In the eastern front of this mansion, Mr. 

 Wyatt has used that very elegant specimen of the Corinthian order without 

 modillions in the entablature, and with the horns of the abacus of the 

 capital coming to a point, instead of being cut off immediately above the 

 Tolute, as in every other known specimen, given in Stuart' " Antiquities of 

 Athens." This is the only instance, I believe, of this order ever having been 

 used since the time of the Athenians, and is a proof of Wyatt's great taste 

 in seeing the beauties of Alhenian architecture through the works of Stuart. 

 The capital, however, loses niuch of its fine efTect by being made the finial 

 of an attached pilaster, instead of a detached column as in the original. A 

 popular legend was common, soon after the completion of this mansion, 

 among the office boys and junior pupils in architect's offices, which proves 

 how much it was the admiratio;; of the travelled cognoscenti of England, — 

 which was, that Mr. Wyatt bad as many rooms in bis house as there were 

 styles in architecture, each appropriated to an order or style ; the Tuscan in 

 the basement, the Doric on the ground-floor, and so on upwa.-ds : which was 

 as near the truth as Isabey's belief that Fuseli, who was notoriously fond of 

 nice cookery, lived upon raw beef-steaks, to encourage those horrible phan- 

 tasies of the brain with which he stored his pictures. 



One more instance of Wyatt's great power to arrange the apartments of 

 an English mansion will suffice to show how much this portion of his works 

 would pay for their conteniplatioa by the aspiring student for architectural 

 fame. It is Ardbraccan-house, near Navan, in the county of Meath, the 

 palace of the bishop of that diocess. In its exterior it is a plain, well-pro- 

 portioned, gentlemanly-looking edifice, with the windows and their intervals 

 in harmonious relation to each other. The customs of the Irish prelacy 

 oftener causes their residences to be filled with visitors on the occasions of 

 ordinations, meetings of the clergy at the cathedral (always near to the palace), 

 and other public gatherings, than is usual in England. Irish hospitality also 

 leads them to follow the scriptural exhortation for bishops to use hospitality, 

 who not only invite their clerical brethren to take their bed and board at the 

 palace, an invitation which is always extended to the wives, and sometimes 

 to the brothers and sisters of the invited, but Irish custom allows barrack- 

 rooms on such festive occasions, which causes a dozen or a score perhaps of 

 single men being placed together, as close as beds will admit, into one room, 

 and a similar establishment for single lasses on the women's side of the 

 house. The whole establishment is, in fact, on these occasions, like a barrack 

 on a small scale, and good quarters found for every one, there being often no 

 inn in the place or for miles round. I was an inmate at this house for some 

 weeks, on the invitation of the late bishop of Meath (Dr. O'Beirne), whilst 

 writing my life of Sir Christopher Wren,— Miss Wren, the great grand- 

 daughter of our illustrious architect, having been for many years domiciled 

 with Mrs. O'Beirne, in the bishop's family. The lady would not trust her 

 manuscripts to the uncertain risks of perils by land and by water in their 

 transmissions to and from Ardbraccan and London ; therefore, as the moun- 

 tain would not come to Mahomet, Mahomet was obliged to go to the moun- 

 tain. There it was I first became acquainted with this peculiar characteristic 

 of Wyatt's architecture, and sorry am I now that I did not take a plan of at 

 least its principal story ; but I was occupied entirely with other objects. The 

 worthy prelate, a tasteful and a travelled man, the friend of the Duke of 

 Portland, Lord Shelburne, Charles Fox, Sheridan, and other illustrious men 

 of his age, was proud of his house and his friend Wyatt, and often pointed 

 out both to me as models to follow. He called his house an elastic, an ex- 

 pansive, a contractile house, for when opening all its apartments and arrang- 

 ing them according to art, he could by closing certain doors, and excluding 

 certain passages and apartments, reduce it to the very moderate size that his 

 small and unostentatious family required, and with as much comfort as if 

 residing in a house no larger than they wanted for themselves. My apart- 

 ments, consisting of a sleeping and dressing room, and a sitting room, where I 

 wrote and had all the Wren papers entrusted to nie, communicated with the 

 bishop's library. This suite of apartments, so complete in itself, was as pri- 

 Tate and detached from the other part of the house as a set of chambers in 

 the Temple ; and if I was ever called upon to leave my study without time 

 to put away my papers, I could either lock that room or at the end of an 

 outer passage the whole suite, so that no one could enter them but myself, 

 and yet they could all be made subservient to the hospitable purposes of an 

 Irish ordination. 



James Wyatt received and educated many pupils, some of whom obtained 



eminence, as may be mentioned hereafter, and not a few are enrolled in the 

 list of gold and silver medallists, emblazoned originally by that elegant pen- 

 man, Tomkins, and continued to the present time, that hangs framed and 

 glazed among the records of the Royal Academy. The portrait of this 

 eminent penman, who surpassed all his predecessors in this line of art, and 

 has been equalled by none since, was the last that Reynolds ever painted. 

 Mr. Wyatt was never knighted, whether it was ever oflered is unknown ; but 

 it may have been declined on account of his being a widower. He was 

 elected a fellow of the Royal Society, much to the annoyance of Sir Joseph 

 Banks, its then president, who preferred twaddlers and titled nonentities to 

 men of genius, whom he feared would discover his shallow pretensions to fill 

 the chair, so gloriously occupied in by-gone days by Brouncker, Wren, and 

 Newton. Wyatt was one year, during a misunderstanding among the Royal 

 Academicians, as to which of their important selves should supersede Ben- 

 jamin West, who was then growing aged, in the presidential chair, elected 

 president without his knowledge. It was upon this or a similar occasion that 

 Fuseli, who wanted a younger and more effective president than the aged 

 painter of the death of Wolfe, wrote in his ballotting paper the name of 

 Mary Lloyd. One of West's supporters asking the sarcastic Swiss why he 

 voted for an old woman, he replied, " Why should I not vote for one old 

 wooman as well as anoder ?" Wyatt proved a perfect King Lng during his 

 reign, for he never troubled either himself or them, and on the few nights 

 that he ever took the chair at a lecture, he fell asleep during its delivery, to 

 the great amusement of the students, who laughed at every oscillation of the 

 presidential cocked hat from shoulder to shoulder. This propensity to doze 

 after dinner was unconquerable in poor Wyatt, who indulged it even at 

 Beckford's table, the most entertaining man of his day, when Nelson was 

 present, interesting the whole party by the recital of his hair-breadth 'scapes 

 and gallant deeds performed by himself and his vahant brothers in arms in 

 the then recently fought battle of the Nile. Honor est a Ailo ; not so 

 thought the lethargic architect, for he dozed, and dozed, and dozed again. 



This eminent man was unfortunately overthrown in his carriage, on a re- 

 turn from Windsor, from the effects of which he never recovered. The office 

 of surveyor-general of the Board of Works, as held under the crown from 

 Inigo Jones and other eminent architects to bis death, has never since been 

 filled up ; some of its duties having devolved upon the office of Woods an 

 Forests, and others being filled up by special appointment of the crown, or 

 acts of parliament, as in the cases of Sir Jeffery WyatviUe, and Messrs. 

 Nash, Blore, and Barry. 



CTo be continued.) 



THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 

 No. III. 



The collection of Etruscan antiquities carries the mind back to a most 

 interesting period, that of a people possessing a high degree of civilization, 

 and a great extent of political power, the masters i)f the Iberian seas, the 

 teachers of the Roman commonwealth. Yet of such a people the chief re- 

 cords are those monuments now before us in ll^e Museum. Of their origin, 

 their language, their political institutions, and their history, we know 

 almost as litlleas if they were pre-Adamites ;— so unstable is human power, 

 so tickle is human glory, so great the vicissitudes of national progress. In 

 this Museum we have, however, before us the liveliest paintings of their 

 persons, their dress, and their manners ; and the scholar will be able ia 

 time to restore the Etruscans on the page of history, as he is now able to 

 restore the Egyptians and the Assyrians. Thus the jealousy and neglect 

 of the Romans, although for so long they overshadowed the Etruscans, 

 will not be able to hide Ihem from us for ever ; perhaps also we may in the 

 end make the monuments of Africa speak of those other rivals, the Car- 

 thaginians, whom Roman envy has shrouded in darkness. Had the Romans 

 told us more, we should have had less to discover, and less pride in the 

 success of our endeavours. 



The origin of the Etruscans is at present involved in doubt — the legends 

 of the ancients have the air of fables, the discussions of be moderns want 

 the support of facts. We can neither admit of a Lydian origin nor can we 

 refute it, and we must know more of the early history of Italy before we 

 can assign the exact value to facts or conjectures. Nevertheless, it does 

 not seem beyond the compass of sound historic synthesis lo enable us t* 

 solve the problem of Elruscan origin ; and this must be done to allow us to 



