re than so many
dialects. Other necessities are matters of doubt: nations have been
alike successful in their architecture in times of poverty and of
wealth; in times of war and of peace; in times of barbarism and of
refinement; under governments the most liberal or the most arbitrary;
but this one condition has been constant, this one requirement clear in
all places and at all times, that the work shall be that of a _school_,
that no individual caprice shall dispense with, or materially vary,
accepted types and customary decorations; and that from the cottage to
the palace, and from the chapel to the basilica, and from the garden
fence to the fortress wall, every member and feature of the
architecture of the nation shall be as commonly current, as frankly
accepted, as its language or its coin.

A day never passes without our hearing our English architects called
upon to be original, and to invent a new style: about as sensible and
necessary an exhortation as to ask of a man who has never had rags
enough on his back to keep out cold, to invent a new mode of cutting a
coat. Give him a whole coat first, and let him concern himself about
the fashion of it afterwards. We want no new style of architecture. Who
wants a new style of painting or sculpture? But we want some style. It
is of marvellously little importance, if we have a code of laws and
they be good laws, whether they be new or old, foreign or native, Roman
or Saxon, or Norman, or English laws. But it is of considerable
importance that we should have a code of laws of one kind or another,
and that code accepted and enforced from one side of the island to
another, and not one law made ground of judgment at York and another in
Exeter. And in like manner it does not matter one marble splinter
whether we have an old or new architecture, but it matters everything
whether we have an architecture truly so called or not; that is,
whether an architecture whose laws might be taught at our schools from
Cornwall to Northumberland, as we teach English spelling and English
grammar, or an architecture which is to be invented fresh every time we
build a workhouse or a parish school. There seems to me to be a
wonderful misunderstanding among the majority of architects at the
present day as to the very nature and meaning of Originality, and of
all wherein it consists. Originality in expression does not depend on
invention of new words; nor originality in poetry on invention of new