204 A GREAT ENGLISH CHRONICLE. NEXT in value to the inheritance which a modern Englishman possesses in the great body of his literature, is, perhaps, his inheritance in the varied architecture of his fair, and, on the whole, very fortunate island. But while England's written chronicle from Bede and Alfred belongs to the race at large, and equally to every branch of the widely scattered English family, her chronicle in stone, and in the humbler materials of brick and mortar, is the peculiar heritage of the homekeeping Briton. Freely circulating wherever the race and language have spread, the one is as readily accessible in San Francisco or Melbourne as in London or Edinburgh; the other, although in a valid sense an inheritance of the race as a whole, is not, for obvious reasons, capable of the same world-wide diffusion. Like Luther's Bible, this chronicle is a chained book. In the present instance the undeniable privilege of possession is tempered by some responsibility. It is true that of late years this fact has received a certain amount of recognition, and that the more splendid pages of the architectural volume are just now somewhat effectually cared for and likely to be preserved at least to immediate posterity. But while the ivycovered fortress and ruined abbey are sedulously propped, and the baronial hall, the cathedral, and the venerable parish church more or less judiciously renovated, other important regions of architecture are less fortunate. It is in the great commercial and manufacturing centres, and in the villages clustering about them (or which once clustered about them), that the most hopeless ruin perhaps is wrought. Here, and in the picturesque High Streets and old-world squares and market-places of the elder towns, the "grim wolf," not of war or famine, but of peace, plenty, and universal increase, "daily devours apace "-now swallowing up a fine old Elizabethan hall, now a mansion of the seventeenth or eighteenth century with its grounds, now a whole row of quaint half-timbered cottages, now a pleasant farm-house, now an ancient inn ; and all this not with "privy paw," like the Popish wolf of Milton, but openly and before our waking eyes. The changes in the outward face of English towns and villages, the havoc and general obliteration which this well-fed, but insatiable monster has wrought in the last fifteen or twenty years, are greater probably than in any similar period since he began his ravages. Close and many are the links of association which bind our history, poetry, drama, and fiction, that is to say, our national life, to the pages of this ancient architectural record. Almost every picture from the earliest which our poetry calls forth, has a background in native architecture. Caedmon sings his CREATION in the hall of a Northumbrian monastery. Chaucer's light-minded company, "from every shire's end of England," meet at a London inn before their final journey to the Cathedral City. Castles, courts, dungeons, palaces, country houses and town houses, streets and inns, along with camps, battlefields, and enchanted forests, fill the pages of the great Elizabethans; Shakespeare especially abounds in palaces and taverns. Their themes may carry us to France, Italy, Greece, Rome, or the ends of the universe, for the imaginations of the old dramatists knew no bounds; but we make these magnificent excursions through the doors of old English playhouses, and between the projecting gables of old English streets. So, too, in the period of Milton and the Puritans. We cover vast ranges of spiritual geography, celestial and infernal, but the great visionary himself is corporeally lodged for the most part in such homely precincts as Bread Street, Fleet Street, Aldersgate Street, Barbican, and Jewin Street. Again leaving that troubled time, with the makers of mundane history busy at the congenial task of smashing painted windows and mural sculpture, and bombs, "like mad evil spirits,' invading even the repose of cathedral aisles, and coming to the milder age of Addison, we find the polite periwigs of that polished era translating Homer, and writing their neat essays on Man, Immortality, and the Pleasures of the Imagination, amid the familiar environment of London coffeehouses, and under the shadow of the resurgent St. Paul's and the new churches of Wren. As we approach still nearer to our own day, the links of this connection become even closer, from the more direct and picturesque treatment which architecture begins to receive. Somewhat early in the last century, Thomas Gray, a Cambridge scholar of repute, set the seal of his exquisite genius on the ivycrowned church and yew-shadowed churchyard of rural England, with all the images, sentiments, and associations which gather round them; in one fortunate poem preserving for all time to the dispersed Anglo-Saxon tribes of America, India, Africa, and Polynesia, the most perfect picture ever yet limned of the most beautiful, most harmonious, most pathetic, and at the same time the commonest object in the moralised English landscape. A little later arose the great-hearted Wizard of the North. To him probably more than to any other writer is due the revived, or rather perhaps the first created, popular interest in the feudal relics of Great Britain, which dates from about the beginning of the present century. Taking under his especial guardianship, along with the mountains and streams of his beloved Scotland, all the castles, abbeys, priories, ancient halls, manors, and moated granges of this island, in what state of repair soever, he made them beautiful, filled them with the brilliant company we all know, or should know, and informed them with a vivid life and interest which they might never have possessed but for the magic of his wand. Then followed the great and famous company of modern English writers whose line has gone out into all the earth. With them the poets, historians, novelists, and essayists of the early and middle part of the century, who made the life of modern, or relatively modern English people, familiar wherever English books are read-grew up a new order of interest and association. The architectural background here is that of the busy, prosperous England of the early steam-age; the age of the new railways with their embankments, bridges, and stations; of suburban villas (detached and semidetached) twenty and thirty instead of four or five miles from town; of the cotton spinners', iron-masters', and railway kings' new country seats; of the summer tourist, and the new seaside and mountain hotels; of Yorkshire mills made as interesting as Yorkshire monasteries by the genius. of Brontë, and London streets of the Victorian age made as delightful as those of the Elizabethan age by the genius of Dickens. Of Barchester Towers, Gatherum Castle, Framley Parsonage, Shepperton Church, and Locksley Hall,-of Bleak House, the White Horse Inn, Boffin's Bower, and the other side of Goswell Street. This is the pleasant, complex, new and old picture of the face of midcentury England, which, aided by the already too profuse arts of illustration, went forth into Greater Britain with the names of Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, Tennyson, George Eliot, and Charlotte Brontë. But it is already a fading picture; for now succeeds our own absorbing epoch, with its own galaxy of geniuses, who though eminently worthy shall for the present be nameless; and with its own achievements in the builder's art, whereof more anon. It would of course be idle to speak of the worth to the nation at large, and to the scattered portions of the English, or rather the British, household, of the more splendid pages of the architectural chronicle ; of the medieval and feudal pages especially. Their worth, though not so universally admitted as many suppose, is now generally recognised, and, as we have said, they are likely, with embellishments and additions of our own, to be handed down in a fair state of preservation to a grateful and appreciative posterity. But the worth of the humbler pages, the secular, civic, domestic pages-is not SO widely recognised; and their chance of being preserved for the enjoyment of future generations is considerably less. Yet these humbler pages form not only the bulk, but also in some respects, the more important portions of the book; for it is almost needless to say that the comparatively few great or remarkable buildings of a country do not determine the character of its architecture so much as the broad and common features of the street and the roadside, of the town, village, and hamlet, which meet us at every turn. And it is just these which make, or once made, the peculiar felicity of English scenery; which fill out and complete the picture whose central objects are the castle and the cathedral, the princely country seat and the rich mediaval parish church. It is these common features, along with the unmatchable freshness and delicacy of the English landscape, which have been the delight of poets and the encomium of travellers. From Miss Mitford to Mr. Ruskin, from Washington Irving to Nathaniel Hawthorne and M. Taine, there has been no diversity of opinion as to their charm. No fairer homes can be found in fiction than those which are drawn in OUR VILLAGE; none in what is called real life than those which are, or were, to be seen in the "lowland hamlets of Beddington and Carshalton," the defilement of whose pleasant waters is lamented in the CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. The native compares shire with shire, the stranger compares them with his own country, and both with an increasing appreciation of their manifold merits. Where elsewhere, in the Anglo-Saxon world at least, can be found such lovely old town and country houses? Where such incomparable old inns and cottages, such picturesque farm-houses, barns, and gateways? Where elsewhere such delightful old High Streets, such pleasant old-world squares and market-places ? tourist is drawn by the far-famed castle and minster, and discovers their common and secular environment to be equally surprising. Warwick is Warwick is as interesting as its fortress; Canterbury and Winchester are as wonderful as their cathedrals; the closes of Norwich, Lichfield, and Salisbury, are as beautiful as the spires that overshadow them. To say truth, The or this frigid northern islet of Britain, which but for the amiable influence of the Gulf Stream would probably be nothing but another Labrador Newfoundland, is, and has long been, a heaped up storehouse of natural and architectural as well as historical treasures; of places and things "too fair to be looked upon but only on holidays," and on golden sunshiny holidays in May or June, which live in happy memory. Truly, oh strong Mother of many strong peoples, thy former children built for thee beautifully and well in the old days! But unless thou look to it thy latter progeny will undo the work of their fathers. Of course this is the bright side, the holiday side. We know well that there are, and have long been, grimy towns as well as gracious towns, black counties as well as beautiful counties. But such things must be in the home of a strenuous and active people. A good workman is known by his chips, and the same is true of a working nation. England is emphatically a working, a toiling nation; and her grimy towns and black counties are merely the chips, the inevitable parings and filings, thrown off in the multiplicity of her virtuous labours. Nor are these work-places necessarily ugly; but even when they are ugly, undeniably and deeply ugly, they possess the unique interest of ugliness, and the interest also of antithesis. The steepled towns would lose half their charm were it not for their sharp contrast to the chimneyed towns. It is not the chimneys, the smoke, the blackness, in their proper place, which mar the holiday picture; it is when the grimy town overlaps and swallows up the gracious town, park, or neighbourhood; this is the particular abomination of desolation standing where it ought not, against which the feeble critic raises his voice. The ravages of our demon of prosperity (it might be writ of democracy) are most observable, as we have said, in the wide tract of architecture between the cottage home and the stately home, -or rather in the tract including both. A slight study of his modes of action shows them to be generally modes of destruction pure and simple, and modes of bad or inharmonious building; or of the two modes combined. This latter form of action is sufficiently familiar to us, being chiefly seen in the suburbs of large cities, where a good many, if not most of us, have to live. How complete in many cases this destructive and reconstructive process is, obliterating all former landmarks, many know to their cost; and also in these latter times how rapidly it is carried on. The semi-rural dwellings of earlier generations with their ampler gardens, shrubberies and lawns, seem to be the most tempting prey of the devourer, who has also an especially keen tooth for historic houses and their grounds. The rapidity with which a pleasant domain of this latter kind is transmuted into close lines of tenements and shops, or minute villas of ludicrously uniform pattern, can be paralleled only by the speed with which the jungle swallowed up the wicked native village in Mr. Kipling's tale. Only here it is not "letting in the jungle," but letting in London, Manchester, or Birmingham. But although this phenomenon has become so familiar that we now hardly notice it, and commonly accept it as the inevitable result of commercial prosperity, our demon is the very genius of increase; its effect, with but few exceptions, is the degradation of architecture. All good architecture by general admission is of slow, or at least of moderately slow, growth. There is na workeman That can bothe worken well and hastilie, This must be done at leisure parfaitlie,— and there is nothing leisurely now in the growth of English and American cities. This particular form of building activity, however, though bad enough where it is operative, is less hurtful to the broader aspects of architecture than certain others, being confined to the greater business and manufacturing centres, which, though of importance, are after all, but a part of the whole; and its erections, also, are seldom permanent, as these small tenement and villa tracts are often, as if by Nemesis, swept away themselves after a short life by factories, public works, and large commercial buildings. More widespread and lasting by far, and more serious because almost impossible of remedy, is the injury done in the gracious towns themselves. By this we mean the gradual, but none the less sure, effacement of the peculiar features which make, or once made, them, not merely old-world and interesting, but also distinctively native and English. Fortunately in most of the cathedral and abbey towns, and in other smaller towns of which we may speak, the progress of this effacement is comparatively slow; its movement, however, can be easily seen, and its ultimate result predicted with a degree of certainty. And in most cases the result would probably be this: that while the more important features, the cathedrals, abbeys, and parish churches, with our own additions and embellishments-would remain, with the more noted secular buildings, such as the old hos pitals and a few specimens of the early overhanging gables,—the wider architectural features, the indescribable felicities of the old corners, the quaint groupings of chimneys, roofs, and gables, the happy combinations of form and colour-which make the present charm of many of the old streets and squares, would disappear, and their place be taken by architec ture of a wholly different kind. That is, while the monumental and famous edifices would be more carefully propped and preserved than ever, the towns themselves would be gradually rebuilt and modernised. But this, it will be said, is exactly what has always been going on. The ecclesiastical and other famous structures have stood with but slight alteration, while in the towns which surround them one type of building has succeeded another since the beginning; and the happy variety of new and old which we now see is the fortuitous result. But unluckily for the continuance of this ideal development, the buildings which are just now taking the place of the old, in too many instances give no possible hope of future picturesqueness, indeed forbid the hope. This is not because they are different from anything that went before the various successions of the earlier periods were often that; but because they have no affinity with their surroundings, and can never be harmonised with them. Some of the many new types,-those for example with the Mansard and other forms of modern Continental roof and ornament are exotics in England, and have always since their importation been at war with the elements of the architecture of the country and smaller provincial towns; much more opposed even than the old classical importations, some of which may be said to have become in a manner naturalised. Other types are equally at variance from being bad in themselves; a notable case in point being the now very prevalent one, which, with nothing else in common with Gothic, adorns, or covers itself with its features, lancet windows, clustered columns, decorated capitals, and the like to such an extent that it may be styled the order of ecclesiastical hotel and cathedral villa. Still another type belonging to the same category of intrinsic badness, |