allery, or a Museum baptised with the name of the country,
these are monuments to which all should be able to look up with pride,
and which should exercise an elevating influence upon the spirit of the
humblest. What is their influence in London? Let us not criticise what
all condemn. But how remedy the evil? What is wanted in architecture,
as in so many things, is a man. Shall we find a refuge in a Committee of
Taste? Escape from the mediocrity of one to the mediocrity of many? We
only multiply our feebleness, and aggravate our deficiencies. But one
suggestion might be made. No profession in England has done its duty
until it has furnished its victim. The pure administration of justice
dates from the deposition of Macclesfield. Even our boasted navy never
achieved a great victory until we shot an admiral. Suppose an architect
were hanged? Terror has its inspiration as well as competition.

Though London is vast, it is very monotonous. All those new districts
that have sprung up within the last half-century, the creatures of our
commercial and colonial wealth, it is impossible to conceive anything
more tame, more insipid, more uniform. Pancras is like Mary-le-bone,
Mary-le-bone is like Paddington; all the streets resemble each other,
you must read the names of the squares before you venture to knock at
a door. This amount of building capital ought to have produced a great
city. What an opportunity for architecture suddenly summoned to furnish
habitations for a population equal to that of the city of Bruxelles,
and a population, too, of great wealth. Mary-le-bone alone ought to have
produced a revolution in our domestic architecture. It did nothing. It
was built by Act of Parliament. Parliament prescribed even a facade. It
is Parliament to whom we are indebted for your Gloucester Places, and
Baker Streets, and Harley Streets, and Wimpole Streets, and all those
flat, dull, spiritless streets, resembling each other like a large
family of plain children, with Portland Place and Portman Square for
their respectable parents. The influence of our Parliamentary Government
upon the fine arts is a subject worth pursuing. The power that produced
Baker Street as a model for street architecture in its celebrated
Building Act, is the power that prevented Whitehall from being
completed, and which sold to foreigners all the pictures which the King
of England had collected to civilise his people.

In our own days we have witnessed the r