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time would fail me in the attempt. I will therefore very briefly refer to that 

 one art, which more than any other is within our reach in this country. 



All Art in a country like this, in which the whole time, energy, and 

 interest of the population is devoted to business and to the accumulation of 

 wealth, must be in a neglected condition. Of pictures and statues we have 

 comparatively speaking nothing. Poetry we can have as much of as each man 

 wishes, in an age in which books are within the reach of all. Of musical 

 composition the same may be said ; but of musical performance I can only say, 

 that if we are to accept the critiques which I see in the local papers, there is 

 nothing more to be desired. Over the Art of dining in the colony I draw a 

 veil. It seems to me a subject to be spoken of only as amongst the sacred 

 memories of the past. 



All these Arts we engage in as our tastes or our powers suggest. But 

 one Art there is, which is forced on us of necessity. We may or may not hang 

 our walls with pictures, or adorn our vestibules witli statues ; but we must 

 have walls and vestibules of some sort. We may or may not indulge in music ; 

 but we must have rooms to pi'actice it in ; or if we confine our efforts to the 

 serenade, we must have ladies' windows under which to breathe our amorous 

 strains. Over three-fourths of the earth's surface, the existence of an animal 

 of a constructive mind but a thin skin, clothed with neither fur nor feathers, 

 involves the construction of some sort of shelter ; and out of that necessity of 

 his nature grows the Art of architecture. Again, there are two features in 

 architecture which give it an importance peculiar to itself. First, that its 

 works are durable, and secondly that they are public. They are not like the 

 production of musical sound, or the enjoyment of a feast, things that are gone 

 and remain only in the memory ; nor like clothes, which are perishable and 

 change with the fickleness of fashion. Almost the most perishable structure 

 outlives its builder. And they are public, not private. Your pictures are shut 

 up in your own rooms for the enjoyment of yourself and your friends. Your 

 music is mostly practised in the privacy of your own houses. But it is not so 

 with your house. Once build it, and as a work of Art it ceases to be yo\irs. 

 It belongs to all alike. The bricks and mortar, the wood and the iron are 

 yours, but the form, the image, the Art, is the property of every beholder. The 

 humblest peasant who gazes on the vanes and pinnacles of the neighbouring 

 mansion, as he rests from his labour under the evening sky, can derive as much 

 pleasure from the sight as its lordly proprietor. You can levy no protective 

 duty upon the admiration of your neighbours. You can take out no patent 

 for the monopoly of the enjoyment of beauty. No action for libel will protect 

 you from the rude criticisms of offended taste. Therefore is architecture above 

 all others the catholic art, and mce than all others reflects and expresses 

 whatever a nation may have in it of the power of creating the beautiful. And 

 so, on the other hand, there is involved in architecture a responsibility which 

 does not attach to the productions of other arts. You may hide your little 

 ugliness in your own chambers, and sing out of tune in your own boudoirs, and 

 indulge in tawdry ornament and worship a false fashion in the privacy of 

 social life ; but you do not thereby poison the public taste, or pervert the 

 popular judgment. But you cannot erect forms upon which for long years the eye 

 of the public must rest day by day and hour by hour, without more or less 

 moulding the feeling of the community at large. Whether you wish it or not, 

 every house is a lesson, every town and village a school in art. The extent to 

 which the popular taste becomes moulded by the impi'ession of what is daily 

 before its eyes, is evidenced by the distinctive character which particular towns, 

 vill ages, and districts acquire in the course of time. Not that all the buildings 

 are the same, but that there is a certain unity of feeling which pervades them 

 all, and which gives a special character to the whole which it retains for ages. 



