123 
need that I should enter very much into detail as to the 
perplexities which the art and architecture of the present 
are preparing for the students of future times. For 
every step in which I have been shewing these trustworthy 
characteristics of the past must have reminded you how 
different things are to-day. I tremble sometimes to think 
of the curses which may some day be heaped upon this self- 
complacent nineteenth century, with its great affectation of 
taste and art, by those who in some remote future may have 
the task of disinterring, and endeavouring to interpret our 
monuments ! They will find inscriptions in every variety 
of character, Lombardic, old English, the antique Roman type 
of the end of the 17th century, and — but very sparingly — 
in the beautiful characters which our modern type foujiders 
have elaborated, — such type as never was in the world 
before, but of which modern Englishmen seem ashamed. 
They will find drinking fountains of Queen Victoria’s reign 
inscribed in characters which would betoken an origin under 
the Plantagenets ; and ridged tombstones of decent Manches- 
ter merchants hardly distinguishable from those of the old, 
spurred and belted border-knights who compounded for 
their sins by leaving estates to the monks on condition 
of burial within the cloisters. They will find books printed 
in carefully imitated types of the sixteenth century referring 
to matters which ordinary history would have led them to 
believe happened in the nineteenth. 
But it is in matters of architecture that they will experi- 
ence the most bewildering perplexity. Imagine, if it is 
possible, Manchester disinterred from the superincumbent 
mould of three thousand years by some enterprizing relative 
of Mr. Macaulay’s celebrated New Zealander, who has read 
of “ the Manchester School,” and desires, like another Dr. 
Schlieman anent Troy, to prove to his incredulous country- 
men, that Manchester was a real place, and its school a 
veritable seat of learning ! Imagine the curious wonder 
