The Inaugural Address. 



7 



house to dwell in. Let anyone go to Norwood, or Anerley, or 

 Wimbledon, or Richmond, and inspect the modern style of house 

 there and see what he will find. A square door in the centre, two 

 square windows on either side of the door, and three square windows 

 above, and, by way of ornamentation, a sort of curvature of different 

 colored bricks, giving 1 the outside of the house very much the ap- 

 pearance of a man's face, the nose quite flat and spectacles on the 

 eyes. If you have any choice you don't elect a house of this kind ; 

 you rather go to the study of archaeology for your model, and whilst 

 you will have all the appliances of modern warmth and comfort in- 

 side, you will go, say, to the days of the Tudors, or the earlier 

 Hanoverians, for your outside building and architecture. So it is 

 not to modern times, but to the times of comparative antiquity, that 

 you resort for your domestic architecture, and it is the same in 

 the matter of Church architecture, and it is, or ought to be, 

 the same in the matter of public buildings. Put any average parish 

 Church side by side with any average meeting-house of fifty years 

 ago, and you see at once why, in the better development of public 

 taste, there is (I do not mean to speak profanely) at least one worship 

 in common between the meeting-house of to-day and the Church of 

 England — the worship, namely, of archeology. Or compare some 

 of our public buildings with similar buildings, the produce, it may 

 be, of very remote antiquity, and see if we have not even yet very 

 much to learn from the Ancients. Some years ago, when I was 

 travelling in the South of India and in Ceylon, I was very much 

 struck with the enormous stone tanks used for the storage of lar°:e 

 bodies 6f water. In one place in particular I found that the sides 

 of these tanks were made up of huge blocks of stone, laid one on 

 the top of the other, without cement and without clamps. No 

 repairs, I was informed, were ever needed. Yet these tanks had 

 received into their bosoms for centuries floods of water such as we 

 do not dream of in England, and had retained the rain for the 

 necessities of large populations, dependent upon them for health 

 and cleanliness and food — their very life in short. We constantly 

 hear — I read only the other day, of the disastrous failure of modern 

 reservoirs, and of the vast destruction of life and property which 



