ART. IV. 1. Contrasts, or a Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and similar Buildings of the Present Day; shewing the present decay of Taste. By A. Welby Pugin, architect. 4to. Lond.

1836.

2. A Reply to Observations which appeared in "Fraser's Magazine" for March 1837, on a work entitled "Contrasts." By the Author of that Publication. 8vo. London. 1837.

R. PUGIN is an architect of acknowledged merit, and of established reputation. He is one of the many who have been, in late years, attracted to the ancient and true Church, by her secondary prerogatives of taste, beauty, and surpassing grandeur in her outward forms; and who, approaching her nearer, and discovering in her all that can satisfy the intelligence and the heart, as well as charm the sense and the imagination, have sought and found their happiness in her bosom. Within these few months, we have observed the Siècle, a notorious French paper, accuse M. von Haller of having joined the same Church, rather from an admiration of its social and political principles than from a conviction of its doctrines,—rather as a publicist than a theologian. Let not Mr. Pugin, then, feel other than flattered, if a similar charge has been made against him by a journal too well known for its habitual, amiable candour, to be believed by any one when it treats of Catholics. The "Contrasts" is a book full of life and spirit, and amusing, though unto sadness. It is a "comparative anatomy" of architectural science. It does not represent this science through its different stages, such as was naturally to be expected, as a growing, perfectible science, of which the later periods display a grander or chaster development of artistic principles than the earlier. On the contrary, it exhibits the same members and forms as were once joined together in all the symmetry of fair proportions, now clumsily hung to one another in monstrous shapes and illassorted connexions. It shows us, if we may so speak, the organs of social life, through which alone, as a moral, or a political body, a nation can live or breathe, in its religious and public edifices,-once adapted most perfectly to every required end,-noble in their development, sound in their structure, and healthy in their action; but now presenting no trace of fitness, beauty, or design, to prove that the "mens divinior" has any part in contriving or producing them. If the light,

"Fraser's Magazine," March 1837.

symmetrical, elegant form of the antelope, be contrasted with the awkward, cumbrons, and disgusting configuration of the sloth, there will not be a greater dissimilarity of similar parts, a wider disconformity of adaptation to the same actions, nor a greater impossibility of referring the two to the same class or genus, than there is when we compare the architecture of the two periods selected by Mr. Pugin.

But his plates present us only the phenomena, of which we naturally desire an explanation. It is true, indeed, that the eye decides almost intuitively. Each plate presents a double view of some public edifice, such as it was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and such as it is now-a-days constructed. We begin with the most solemn part of a cathedral, its altar. On one side is the exquisite screen of Durham Abbey, not as now remaining after the ravages of Iconoclast reformers, an unmeaning fabric of matchless tracery, but all its niches filled with holy images, the altar restored, and the priest celebrating thereon the august mysteries: such, in short, as the faithful saw it in 1430. Beside it stands the chancel of Hereford Cathedral, such as modern taste has made it, be-pillared and be-pannelled with broken entablatures, pediments within pediments, but without cornices, a mere piece of carpenter's work, with a mean cloth-covered table, on which, as on a buffet, are displayed the flagons and salvers of the communion service. Who sees not that one is a Catholic, the other a Protestant, cathedral? Next come parochial churches; here, from the wide portals of an ancient church, streams forth a picturesque procession, and pours over the flights of steps, which give a nobler elevation to the massive tower and lofty building; there, from the shade of Nash's disproportioned circular portico in Langham Place, topped by the unimaginable ugliness of his column-girded “extinguisher," trips out a slender congregation. Who can doubt which is the Catholic, and which the Protestant parish?

Of the next plate, "Contrasted Royal Chapels," we are not sure that the attorney-general ought not to take cognizance. It is evidently Mr. Pugin's intention to bring royalty into contempt. What else can he mean by exhibiting to the public a chapel royal, which he pretends is to be seen in the heathenish Pavilion at Brighton, looking to all intents and purposes like a concert-room, with a double gallery, supported by spindle columns, narrow overgrown pilasters, shooting up the walls to the ceiling, and a ball-room assembly, met, to all appearance, not so much for worshipping God, as for hearing man, under the form of a portly dignitary, who, perched in a lofty pulpit, is no doubt preaching on the duty of mortification. Now, this

treasonable representation is rendered doubly evident by the juxtaposition of fine old Windsor chapel, as it used to be when its choristers and clergy sung there the solemn mass. What is this but a clear insinuation that the presence of royalty itself can hardly throw an interest round Protestant worship, when performed in the temples which itself has raised, in true accordance with its own tasteless forms; while the sublime functions of the old church exactly harmonize with the character of those solemn and sumptuous edifices which it erected? The one thought only of making a chapel for a king, the other, of raising a temple to God.

Sometimes we are really inclined to suspect Mr. Pugin of more occult, but not therefore the less dangerous, malice. When we look at his "Contrasted Public Conduits," we cannot resist the temptation of believing him to have in his eye a most wicked allegory. It is plain, that the beautiful, ornamental fountain, ever affording living waters to those that seek them, without effort and without price, symbolizes the old and generous religion, under whose domination it was erected; while the ungraceful, stiff, selfish-looking pump, with its handle chained down, and the child that comes for water, chid and sent elsewhere by its legal guardian, the policeman, while a long list of fees for ecclesiastical rites stares from the wall, is no unapt emblem of the law-established Church. But what shall we say of his "Contrasted Episcopal Residences?" On examining this plate, we know not whether indignation, or pity, or contempt, be the uppermost feeling in our minds, towards the degraded taste of our country, which could allow such a mansion as old Ely Palace to be sold, pulled down, and replaced by the mean brick buildings of Ely Place; but, at the same time, it does not at all surprise us, that a bishop who has daughters to bring out, and sons to get into the Guards, should have considered a Gothic house in Holborn a vulgar bore, encumbered, as it was, with cloisters, libraries, and large chapels, and preferred a neat, three-windowed house, in a more fashionable neighbourhood. Still, it argues great want of tenderness in Mr. Pugin, to contrast the two so prominently, seeing that the difference of taste has arisen from such delicate feelings of parental solicitude as we have alluded to. For, it is evident, that a married bishop must have "nursery windows;" and, as Mr. Pugin himself tells us, that "the great test of architectural beauty is the fitness of the design to the purpose for which it is intended; and that the style of a building should so correspond with its use, that the spectator may at once perceive the purpose for which it was erected," (p. 1) he must own, that the Bishop of

Ely's genteel house in Dover Street, is a much better architectural specimen of what a Protestant bishop's residence should be, than the cloistered palace of Holborn, which clearly belongs to times when bishops gave hospitality, afforded means of study to poor scholars, were daily seen at public prayers, and gave a third of their incomes to their children, the poor,-things utterly useless now-a-days, as long as we have plenty of inns, abundant reading-rooms, and sufficient poor-rates.

It is, therefore, sufficiently plain, from the bare inspection of Mr. Pugin's plates, that he means us to infer, that the decline, or rather the barbarization, of our national architecture, is traceable to the change of religion in our country, commonly called the Reformation. His text, however, more fully explains his object, if any explanation be required, and presents a bold and masterly sketch of the changes which that unhappy event introduced into his noble science. He glows with an honest and merited indignation, in contemplating the sacrilegious and barbarous scenes of early Protestantism, its mutilations, its desecrations, its spoliations and destructions, worse by far than ever Goth or Vandal perpetrated in a Christian land. He comments with deserved severity and sarcasm upon the modern successors of the race, who have done almost more, by avaricious neglect, to destroy, or, by ill-judged restorations, to deface, the remnants of our once glorious cathedrals and churches, than the fanatics who first assailed them. He proves, what every one's eye must readily convince him of, that the ancient cathedrals are every way unsuitable for Protestant worship, and that, even after they have been cut down, boxed off, and made what is called comfortable, they are still unfit for the purpose to which they are now applied.

In fact, it is evident that the Catholic and Protestant religions have two essentially different principles of worship, and two different standards of proportions; both of which must necessarily influence the form and characteristics of their religious edifices. The worship of the Catholic Church is based upon the belief in rites and practices, endowed with essential holiness, and capable of communicating this quality to external objects; that of the Protestant, entirely on the uncertain influence of a human agency. Take the clergyman out of his pulpit and reading desk, and there is nothing in the parish church which warns or invites the members of his flock to kneel and pray. But the Catholic peasant goes not past the door of his church without an act of reverence; the traveller, who enters it through curiosity, kneels for a brief space to pray, before proceeding to examine its paintings or tombs; and this at a time when no

service is actually performing. And why? because the belief in a sacrament wherein our Blessed Redeemer is ever present, inspires a reverence for the entire temple in which it reposes; the very celebration of its solemn mysteries leaves a savour of holiness throughout the building, which renders it, through the day and night, a holy place. In like manner, if we suppose the Protestant preacher to be indeed in his desk, but one of the congregation placed at such a distance as not to hear a syllable of what he says, for example, just entering at the western door of a cathedral, while service is going on beyond the screen, there is no common tie between the two, and the stranger can no more be a partaker of the worship than if he were outside the church-yard. On the other hand, if the Catholic have passed the threshold of the vastest cathedral, and see the holy sacrifice offered upon its most distant altar, he will kneel in adoration, sensible that he has come into the presence chamber of the King of Kings. Hence it follows, that to places of Protestant worship, it is the limited faculty of hearing that must suggest proportions; while the sight, almost boundless and quite insatiable, the boldest and divinest of the senses, gives the standard of measure and proportion to the Catholic temple. When our ancestors knelt upon the battle-field, during the celebration of mass, there was a sublimity in the simultaneous act of adoration directed by thousands towards one object, which their eye could reach: whereas, were it desired that a modern Protestant army should be made to pray before risking their lives in battle, it would be necessary for each regimental chaplain to read the service separately to his corps, if, indeed, it would not be necessary for each company to have prayers by itself. Wherever Protestants have to build churches or meeting houses, the first object in view has necessarily been, that the preacher should be audible in every part. This rule is incompatible with grandeur of dimensions or proportions; it imposes the necessity of introducing galleries, which destroy the unbroken loftiness of a building, and, what is still worse, makes the clergyman instead of the altar the principle object of attention. Where they have overlooked their proper standard, as when they built St. Paul's, or adopted our old cathedrals, they have necessarily reduced the body of the edifice to the degraded condition of a vestibule to the chancel, wherein alone are performed acts of public worship. But in Catholic countries, as once in our own, every foot of the building, from wall to wall, and from pavement to ceiling, belongs to God, and is consecrated to his worship. The threshold is as secure from profanation as the sanctuary; the sister arts are engaged to decorate the walls