to do with the national workships. Those who have taught the working men that a government can feed and employ the people,' have been the ecclesiastical and oligarchical leaders of Europe for many centuries, from the date of the erection of the first workhouse or almshouse, down to the Whig Public Works in Ireland. These institutions embodied nothing new. When in Rome, Mr. Cobden might have seen labouring men wheeling earth in barrows with stately ease, and, if there was the lightest shower, with their cloaks on, and, if he had inquired, he would have been told that they were labourers whom the Pope was bound by law to employ and to pay at the rate of a 'Paul' a day, which is about sixpence. Moreover, when the Executive Commission summoned the National Guard to the suppression of the insurrection, they signed their names to a proclamation which authenticates and declares the fact, that at the commencement the insurgents displayed at their barricades the flags of all the pretenders.' Louis Blanc has taught that the State ought neither to be the feeder nor the employer of the poor, but that the State ought to be the banker of the poor. It ought to lend them capital. With Mr. Cobden we think this an erroneous view of what a government ought to do, but it was not adopted, and, therefore, could not have had any share in causing the insurrection. It would be hard to make M. Louis Blanc responsible for the consequences of the rejection of it. Food for all and work for all, are old European ideas, of which M. Louis Blanc disapproves, along with Mr. Cobden and Mr. Somerville. The destruction of credit and the stoppage of trade consequent upon the overthrow of a dynasty, itself preceded by a period of dearth, and the gold of the pretenders lavished on a city population which has not had either the relief of a poor-law, or the moral drainage for its criminals of a Sydney or a Norfolk Island, these are circumstances explanatory of the siege of Paris, feasible, tangible, and accordant with facts. M. Louis Blanc is one of the most calumniated men in Europe, and we are sorry men like Mr. Cobden and Mr. Somerville should repeat the sinister slanders, by which oligarchical intriguers impute their own guilt to the innocent.

ART. III.-1. An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture in England. By the late Thomas Rickman. Fifth Edition. With very considerable Additions and new plates. London and Oxford: J. H. Parker. 1848.

2. The Archæological Journal of the Archæological Institute. Vols. I.-IV. London: 1845-8.

3. The Journal of the British Archæological Association. Vols. I.III. London: 1846-8.

4. The Ecclesiologist. Published by the Ecclesiological, late Cambridge Camden, Society. Vols. I.-VIII. London: Masters, 1841-8.

It is now somewhat less than a century since the clear-sighted artist, James Barry, might have been found confidentially discoursing to his too indulgent patron, Burke, of that barbarous architecture called Gothic,' and its detestable characteristics,' and of the general baseness of Gothic taste;' since Warburton and Horace Walpole vented their puerile conceits on the invention of this taste; and since the whole muster-roll of writers on the matter-contemporaneous or antecedent-of any, the slightest feeling or worth, comprised but three names: those of the poets Thomas Warton and Gray, and of the Rev. J. Bentham. Scanty as was the then existing amount of intelligence among us on this head, it had been preceded by a scantier; by times when Wotton, Wren, and the gossip Evelyn, had, after the fashion of their continental teachers, put forth conjectures and dogmas about the Goths' and their architecture, as trivial, as irrelevant, as obtuse, as their authors had been discussing confectionary or Parisian fashions-or any other topic, about which the betrayal of knowledge and feeling may not be reckoned imperatively binding on the discourser. Preceded by a yet narrower, it was followed by a larger and fuller appreciation. The Society of Antiquaries, after dozing for some half century of its existence, over the gleanings of a few old gentlemen's morning rambles, began to assume a more efficient life in its publications. In its illustrations of some among our cathedrals and conventual remains, more especially, it, through the aid of its architectural draughtsman, John Carter, laid the foundations of a more accurate acquaintance with the monuments of our ancient English architecture. Honest John Carter himself, too, did much on his own account, and by pen and pencil enthusiastically advocated the cause of that forgotten style.

VOL. XXV.

The work was carried on by Britton, and his well-organized school of picturesque, yet architectural illustrators of our cathedrals and other mediaval remains; then by the elder Pugin, in his more purely scientific illustrations; by Wild, again, and others of the picturesque school; and up to the present day by numerous miscellaneous illustrators of Gothic architecture, as well continental as national, of various merit, and more or less determinate pretension. During the earlier portion of this period, the literary exponents of the ancient architecture were, for the most part, less edifying than their associates, the artistic. The controversialists and dogmatists come first: Milner, Sir James Hall, and others; with various contributors to the Antiquarian Society's Archæologia.' Much valuable time was lost in that interminable discussion about the 'origin of the pointed arch,' and the place of its nativity. This was the great question: to this were all others secondary; to this, the question of the origin of pointed or Gothic architecture itself narrowed. More practical and better-directed study has long since made it clear that this is but one point, out of many, to be resolved; that upon this one point the origin of the Gothic system depended but quite subordinately; many complex causes assisting to that great end. We now, moreover, feel even the general question of the gradual growth and first development of this fine architectural life of the medieval time, interesting as it is, to be inferior to that of the determination of the principle of that life itself; its resolution, of value, only so far as forwarding this determination.

The origin of error in our theorizings, here as elsewhere, has ever consisted in this, that men, in the place of confining their observation and thinking to the specific phenomena themselves, and their history, have gone about essaying to build up a theory of their own how such and such a supposititious cause might have led to such and such a known effect. In this particular branch of inquiry, the first man here in England to stand apart from the close phalanx of the Dryasdusts," with their bootless disputations and dust-raisings; to try his hand at something better, and lay the groundwork of a more accurate and actual theoretic knowledge of the matter discussed, was Thomas Rickman. The fifth and honourably illustrated, though but little augmented, edition of his Attempt,' is announced at the head of this article. Than this Attempt,' on its first appearance, a more important or modestly couched accession to the existing sum of knowledge in any one given direction of inquiry, was assuredly never bestowed upon the world. In the same track of sure, laborious investigation and exposition, followed the scientific writing of Whewell and Willis. The latter, in his architectural

histories of some among our cathedrals, annually contributed at the congresses of the Archæological Institute, still continues in a course of profitable exertion. In this latter direction, indeed, he has stepped forth as a reformer. In his histories, we have topographical narration, freed from that superlative long-windedness, that fatiguing comprehensiveness of historical gossip, inducing the historian to touch on all matters connected, however superficially, with the matter in hand; and from that resultant, prevailing inconsequence of discourse, which till his time so pre-eminently characterized this department of literary, or pseudo-literary composition. As regards, again, the general analysis and history of Gothic architecture in England, valuable increase and exposition of the store Rickman commenced have been made of late years, in the elementary handbooks of Bloxam and Paley; in some of the publications of the Cambridge Camden Society; and in the Oxford Glossary, with its full supplement of beautiful and largely diversified engravings. In addition to the works of Whewell and Willis, important contributions to our knowledge of foreign Gothic have been made through the personal instrumentality and artistic patronage of Gally Knight, as well as in the descriptive sketches of the Rev. J. L. Petit and some others. The general mass of recent elucidatory writing on Gothic architecture, in its aggregate amount and its novelty, forms by itself altogether an important feature in the literature of our time.

The actual active commencement of a deeper and finer theoretic appreciation and knowledge of Gothic architecture, in its own original conditions of life, and in its resultant bearings towards us of the present, may be said to date within the last fifteen years. One of the prominent characteristics of the theoretic life of our age, as well in Germany and France, as among ourselves, has been the revival-at first blind and unconscious, subsequently intelligent and gifted with sight-the general revival of a feeling of sympathy and appreciation for mediæval art. Revolutionary and progressive Europe has been also backlooking Europe, as decisively and pre-eminently. Now that it is too late to avail ourselves of one-half the working of the elder men, we study them and explore their remains; sometimes busy ourselves in preserving these. This revival of purely Christian artistic feeling, in its relation to architecture, has found in our own, as in other countries, a distinct and especially noteworthy theoretic embodiment: not now to mention that less consistent, it has realized practically. This embodiment, we have said, is of altogether recent growth. In some even of the earlier of the before-mentioned writing, is manifested much of this appreciation of the intrinsic artistic value, as well as

of the mere historic developments and relations, of Gothic architecture. The writings of A. Welby Pugin, however, are those in which this appreciation has been most determinately and pregnantly put forth. Allowing for something of intemperate expression of his own individual views of the right religious life, and for something-less prominent, but artistically speaking of more moment-of inadequacy of grasp in regard to his desired sustaining character of general secular architecture, consistently enough entailed by his religious views; with these allowances, his writings claim our sincerest gratitude, for the clearness and boldness with which true architectural principles have therein been elucidated and enforced. And not less worthy of our admiration is the manly frankness with which he has at times confessed to that prior comparatively imperfect knowledge, of which a consciousnesss has been arrived at, in his subsequent advance towards right conceptions of that architecture he at all times loved. Few men of our time that have done as much to claim our admiration, have been so misrepresented, nay, rabidly abused as he has been: with some even now standing as the stock type of a pariah class in artistic thinking.

Much of this has sprung from deficiency of feeling and inadequacy of knowledge in those abusing; much from ignorance of the man abused. Let those whose hostility originates in the latter course turn to his 'Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture,' and they will find him, so far from being a mere bigoted, indiscriminate revivalist, an earnest advocate of a fitting and natural modification to the wants and knowledge of our time, of the old architectural forms, and the old system of material; insisting only upon the choice of those general forms which most nearly affect us, which are Christian and national. Widely as we differ from him in religious doctrine and habits, utterly as we dissent from his exclusive canons in regard to the feasibility of religious character in religious structures; notwithstanding these differences, and others, all honour, we say, be to A. Welby Pugin; for all he has, architecturally speaking, thought and done, of highest worth and import.

Of the old fable of the fly and the wheel we are forcibly enough reminded, while detained by one particular section from out the general mass of active inquirers and talkers about medieval architecture, who have sprung into public life during the last ten years. The ecclesiological party is a party narrowing the study of medieval architecture to its ecclesiastical bearings-thus overlooking much of that remaining from the past most peculiarly addressed to the wants of our own day-discoursing of this partial study under the style of ecclesiology, as a science; and with most conspicuousness and purity repre