chitecture. I think that all will languish
until that takes the lead, and (this I do not _think_, but I proclaim,
as confidently as I would assert the necessity, for the safety of
society, of an understood and strongly administered legal government)
our architecture _will_ languish, and that in the very dust, until the
first principle of common sense be manfully obeyed, and an universal
system of form and workmanship be everywhere adopted and enforced. It
may be said that this is impossible. It may be so--I fear it is so: I
have nothing to do with the possibility or impossibility of it; I
simply know and assert the necessity of it. If it be impossible,
English art is impossible. Give it up at once. You are wasting time,
and money, and energy upon it, and though you exhaust centuries and
treasures, and break hearts for it, you will never raise it above the
merest dilettanteism. Think not of it. It is a dangerous vanity, a mere
gulph in which genius after genius will be swallowed up, and it will
not close. And so it will continue to be, unless the one bold and broad
step be taken at the beginning. We shall not manufacture art out of
pottery and printed stuffs; we shall not reason out art by our
philosophy; we shall not stumble upon art by our experiments, nor
create it by our fancies: I do not say that we can even build it out of
brick and stone; but there is a chance for us in these, and there is
none else; and that chance rests on the bare possibility of obtaining
the consent, both of architects and of the public, to choose a style,
and to use it universally.

How surely its principles ought at first to be limited, we may easily
determine by the consideration of the necessary modes of teaching any
other branch of general knowledge. When we begin to teach children
writing, we force them to absolute copyism, and require absolute
accuracy in the formation of the letters; as they obtain command of the
received modes of literal expression, we cannot prevent their falling
into such variations as are consistent with their feeling, their
circumstances, or their characters. So, when a boy is first taught to
write Latin, an authority is required of him for every expression he
uses; as he becomes master of the language he may take a license, and
feel his right to do so without any authority, and yet write better
Latin than when he borrowed every separate expression. In the same way
our architects would have to be taught to write t