40 



#n §Ucp«ct*traI Colouring. 



By Mh. T. Gambiee Parry. 



jp3RT owes a greater debt to whitewash than it might 

 like at first to avow. "Whitewash preserved the portrait 

 of Dante to Italy, and the records of much ancient art to 

 England. The Puritans' whitewash was as good as a museum 

 for the works it protected. But those works are now rapidly dis- 

 appearing under the improving influences of restoration committees. 

 It is difficult to detect the actual culprit of this ruthless destruction, 

 because the builder employed in repairs shields himself behind the 

 stupid ignorance of his men, the architect shelters himself behind 

 the stupidity of the builder, and the ladies and gentlemen of the 

 subscription list smile safely under the aegis of limited liability. 

 There has been a variation of public taste. It has now gone from 

 one bad thing to another — from whitewash to bare walls. Public 

 taste began to wake to a sense of its own impurity, and then rushed 

 into immoderate use of soap and water. The indiscriminate des- 

 truction of early works of English art has been grievous. Much 

 was bad, no doubt ; but the good has gone with it, and, what is 

 worse, the record of their composition, the incidents of their history, 

 and the expression of their poetry, are gone also. There are, how- 

 ever, scraps enough left to form for us the alphabet of restoration. 

 No geological catastrophe has ever denuded a continent more com- 

 pletely than the flood of modern Purism, under the lying name of 

 Kestoration, has laid bare the architecture of our ancestors. They 

 have bared its very bones. No martyr was ever more effectually 

 flayed. The finer taste of other days had covered the hideous 

 mortar joints and rough masonry of the interior of buildings with 

 a film of fine cement or gesso. But this has all been scraped away, 

 under the ignorant supposition that that two was merely whitewash. 

 Tke exteriors had been left rough by the builders, all fitly and 



