By Mr. T. Oambier Parry. 



41 



rightly enough, to suit the action of rough times and rough climate ; 

 but the interiors were to meet only the gentler action of men's 

 thoughts and men's prayers. Roughness and refinement are both 

 elements of sublimity in art, but they can never change places. 

 What would give masculine grandeur to an exterior would mar all 

 good effect within. The last touch given to the interior was to soften 

 down the asperities of the rough materials. Coarse lines and 

 broken joints of mortar confounded the finer forms of architecture. 

 A thin film of fine cement resolved those discords, and prepared the 

 way for the colourist. But nowadays colour, whitewash, gesso, and 

 all are gone. Architecture, first washed of its dirt, then deprived of 

 its complexion, and last of all denuded of its very skin, is presented 

 to us in a state of nudity, which we are then called on to admire ! 

 This ruthless process, besides its effect on countless minor buildings, 

 has reduced the interior of Lichfield and a great part of Worcester 

 Cathedrals to a condition of bare masonry and vaulting, like that 

 of a common beer cellar, and has given the two magnificent columns 

 which rise from the floor to the roof of the choir of Ely the appear- 

 ance of two huge piles of double Gloucester cheeses. These are 

 but illustrations. This ruinous process has been the rule of modern 

 restoration. 



The employment of colour in architecture in the times of 

 its greatest perfection is now too generally admitted to need 

 proof or argument. The beauty of a nude colourless architecture 

 may be and often is very great ; but it needs to be of the highest 

 art to bear the trial of such nude exposure. Such beauty, the nude 

 beauty of uncoloured architecture, is of the most abstract kind. 

 The forms of architecture, and consequently the beauty of their 

 composition, have nothing in common with nature. Of course its 

 structure has ; but I am now speaking of the higher ideal of its 

 art, not the lower one of its mechanism. That higher ideal is a 

 most abstract one. There is an element of beauty in architecture 

 which surpasses the original conception of the architect. A painter 

 preconceives his work ; a sculptor does so, and works it gradually 

 into shape in plastic clay ; but an architect does not and cannot 

 preconceive all the varying effects of perspective and of light. 



