ne, or soft limestone; and styles in any degree
dependent on purity of line, as the Italian Gothic, must be practised
altogether in hard and undecomposing materials, granite, serpentine, or
crystalline marbles. There can be no doubt that the nature of the
accessible materials influenced the formation of both styles; and it
should still more authoritatively determine our choice of either.

It does not belong to my present plan to consider at length the second
head of duty of which I have above spoken; the preservation of the
architecture we possess: but a few words may be forgiven, as especially
necessary in modern times. Neither by the public, nor by those who have
the care of public monuments, is the true meaning of the word
_restoration_ understood. It means the most total destruction which a
building can suffer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be
gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing
destroyed. Do not let us deceive ourselves in this important matter; it
is _impossible_, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore
anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That
which I have above insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit
which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, never can be
recalled. Another spirit may be given by another time, and it is then a
new building; but the spirit of the dead workman cannot be summoned up,
and commanded to direct other hands, and other thoughts. And as for
direct and simple copying, it is palpably impossible. What copying can
there be of surfaces that have been worn half an inch down? The whole
finish of the work was in the half inch that is gone; if you attempt to
restore that finish, you do it conjecturally; if you copy what is left,
granting fidelity to be possible (and what care, or watchfulness, or
cost can secure it,) how is the new work better than the old? There was
yet in the old _some_ life, some mysterious suggestion of what it had
been, and of what it had lost; some sweetness in the gentle lines which
rain and sun had wrought. There can be none in the brute hardness of
the new carving. Look at the animals which I have given in Plate XIV.,
as an instance of living work, and suppose the markings of the scales
and hair once worn away, or the wrinkles of the brows, and who shall
ever restore them? The first step to restoration, (I have seen it, and
that again and again--seen it on the Baptist