atural; and I think his imagination originally vigorous,
certainly his fancy, his grasp of momentary passion considerable, his
sense of action in the human body vivid and ready. But no original
talent, however brilliant, can sustain its energy when the demands upon
it are constant, and all legitimate support and food withdrawn. I do not
recollect in any, even of the most important of Cattermole's works, so
much as a fold of drapery studied out from nature. Violent
conventionalism of light and shade, sketchy forms continually less and
less developed, the walls and the faces drawn with the same stucco
color, alike opaque, and all the shades on flesh, dress, or stone, laid
in with the same arbitrary brown, forever tell the same tale of a mind
wasting its strength and substance in the production of emptiness, and
seeking, by more and more blindly hazarded handling, to conceal the
weakness which the attempt at finish would betray.

This tendency of late, has been painfully visible in his architecture.
Some drawings made several years ago for an annual illustrative of
Scott's works were for the most part pure and finely felt--(though
irrelevant to our present subject, a fall of the Clyde should be
noticed, admirable for breadth and grace of foliage, and for the bold
sweeping of the water, and another subject of which I regret that I can
only judge by the engraving; Glendearg at twilight--the monk Eustace
chased by Christie of the Clint hill--which I think must have been one
of the sweetest pieces of simple Border hill feeling ever painted)--and
about that time his architecture, though always conventionally brown in
the shadows, was generally well drawn, and always powerfully conceived.

Since then, he has been tending gradually through exaggeration to
caricature, and vainly endeavoring to attain by inordinate bulk of
decorated parts, that dignity which is only to be reached by purity of
proportion and majesty of line.

Sec. 34. The evil in an archaeological point of view of misapplied invention
in architectural subject.

It has pained me deeply, to see an artist of so great original power
indulging in childish fantasticism and exaggeration, and substituting
for the serious and subdued work of legitimate imagination, monstre
machicolations and colossal cusps and crockets. While there is so much
beautiful architecture daily in process of destruction around us, I
cannot but think it treason to _imagine_ anything; at