CHAP. V. STUDIES ARCHITECTURE. 333 



ever. He said he was a 'poor Shoe,' and durst not 

 eat that. In the midst of the uproar Church and King 

 were forgotten, and eventually I prevailed upon the 

 landlord to accept from me as much as enabled poor 

 little Moses to get his meal of bread and cheese ; and 

 by the time the coach started they seemed all perfectly 

 reconciled." l 



Telford was much gratified by his visit to Bath, and 

 inspected its fine buildings with admiration. But he 

 thought that Mr. Wood, who, he says, " created modern 

 Bath," had left no worthy successor. In the buildings 

 then in progress he saw clumsy designers at work, " blun- 

 dering round about a meaning "- if there was meaning 

 at all in their designs, which, indeed, he failed to see. 

 From Bath he went to London by coach, making the 

 journey in safety, " although," he says, " the collectors 

 had been doing duty on Hounslow Heath." During 

 his stay in London he carefully examined the prin- 

 cipal public buildings by the light of the experience 

 which he had gained since he last saw them. He also 

 spent a good deal of his time in studying rare and 

 expensive works on architecture the use of which he 

 could not elsewhere procure at the libraries of the 

 Antiquarian Society and the British Museum. There 

 he perused the various editions of Yitruvius and Pal- 

 ladio, as well as Inigo Jones's ' Parentalia.' He 

 found a rich store of ancient architectural remains in 

 the British Museum, which he studied with great care : 

 antiquities from Athens, Baalbec, Palmyra, and Her- 

 culaneum ; " so that," he says, " what with the informa- 

 tion I was before possessed of, and that which I have 

 now accumulated, I think I have obtained a tolerably 

 good general notion of architecture." 



From London he proceeded to Oxford, where he 



1 Letter to Mr. Andrew Little, Langholm, dated Shrewsbury, 10th March, 

 1793. 



