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I have heard it said, — " of what use is it to devote money or labour to an archi- 

 tecture in perishable materials, in 3 x 4 scantling and inch boards 1" I reply, 

 first, that wood properly used is by no means so perishable a material as is 

 generally supposed. The church of Beover, in Cheshire, which was restored 

 some years ago, is one of the noblest specimens of the mediaeval wooden archi- 

 tecture of England. It was built, I believe, about 1350, and is in perfect 

 preservation. I have heard there still exists a small chapel of oaken logs in 

 which the body of St. Edmund was laid one night on its journey to Bury St. 

 Edmunds, where it was buried. That was in the ninth century, a thousand 

 years ago. Many of our finest roofs are many hundred years old : witness 

 that of Westminster Abbey, built by Richard II. The spire of old St. Paul's, 

 which was burnt in the fire of London, having lasted nearly four hundred and 

 fifty years, was 500 feet high, and was entirely of wood. 



But even were it so, I reply that your house itself may pei'ish, but the 

 idea does not perish ; the effect on the public j udgment is imperishable. If 

 your house be false and hideous, it has diffused its ugliness into the hearts of 

 all beholders for the period of its short but noxious existence. It has to a 

 certain extent incapacitated the public mind from appreciating nobler forms. 

 If you build ugly houses in wood, your children will build uglier houses — were 

 that possible— in stone. All architecture was originally wood. The marble 

 temples and porticos of Athens never lost the forms which were derived from 

 their original wooden construction. England had a wooden architecture 

 specially adapted to her climate, of remarkable beauty. In the perishable 

 structures of earlier times are laid the foundations of that true and cultivated 

 sense of the beautiful, out of which alone a noble Art can arise of more costly 

 and permanent materials. 



Now I cannot at present even glance at the sources of beauty in archi- 

 tecture, but I may indicate one principle which follows from what we have 

 dwelt on this evening. One principle there is, from which there is no excep- 

 tion ; that falsehood, sham, pretence, vanity, are incompatible with all that is 

 great, noble, and beautiful in Art. I will take two instances of what I mean, 

 derived from the architecture of this colony. First, the attempt to imitate 

 stone in wood. This pervades the whole character of our Art. Even our 

 construction is borrowed from stone. I see buttresses to our churches, which, 

 were they of solid stone, would have been a source of strength ; but which, 

 being no more than hollow boxes of inch board, coveiing a prop or strut, are 

 of compartively little use. Secondly, all the mouldings and ornaments are 

 borrowed from stone, and look well enough as long as they are new ; but when 

 the varnish is gone, and the paint cracked, and the wood distorted and shrunk, 

 which very soon happens, they look tawdry and dilapidated. We adopt a 

 style of ornament applicable to stone, but which cannot be durably rendered 

 in wood. The result is that our towns look as if they had got up late after 

 spending the past night in dissipation. Again, we complete the whole by 

 painting and sanding the boards, and working the edges so as to make the wall 

 look like stone. And so our building stands staring us in the face with a per- 

 petual falsehood, and one which we can all the time detect. Now whatever 

 we may think of a lie, surely an unsuccessful lie is the most contemptible of 

 human efforts. 



One more instance I will take, and it shall be the last. The noblest form 

 in architecture is beyond doubt the gable ; running, where both faces are 

 equal, into the pinnacle and spire. The gable naturally rises out of the neces- 

 sity for throwing the rain off the house-top by a sloping roof; and we have 

 seen in the earlier part of this discourse, that it is out of such necessities that 

 the most beautiful forms frequently grow. But in street architecture it is often 

 more convenient to place the ridge of the roof parallel to the street, in which 



