London sketching mediaeval
details in these neo-Pagan days, when a lull has come over the study of
English Gothic architecture, through a re-awakening to the art-forms of
times that more nearly neighbour our own, is accounted for by the fact
that George Somerset, son of the Academician of that name, was a man
of independent tastes and excursive instincts, who unconsciously, and
perhaps unhappily, took greater pleasure in floating in lonely currents
of thought than with the general tide of opinion. When quite a lad, in
the days of the French Gothic mania which immediately succeeded to the
great English-pointed revival under Britton, Pugin, Rickman, Scott, and
other mediaevalists, he had crept away from the fashion to admire what
was good in Palladian and Renaissance. As soon as Jacobean, Queen
Anne, and kindred accretions of decayed styles began to be popular, he
purchased such old-school works as Revett and Stuart, Chambers, and the
rest, and worked diligently at the Five Orders; till quite bewildered
on the question of style, he concluded that all styles were extinct, and
with them all architecture as a living art. Somerset was not old enough
at that time to know that, in practice, art had at all times been as
full of shifts and compromises as every other mundane thing; that ideal
perfection was never achieved by Greek, Goth, or Hebrew Jew, and
never would be; and thus he was thrown into a mood of disgust with
his profession, from which mood he was only delivered by recklessly
abandoning these studies and indulging in an old enthusiasm for poetical
literature. For two whole years he did nothing but write verse in every
conceivable metre, and on every conceivable subject, from Wordsworthian
sonnets on the singing of his tea-kettle to epic fragments on the Fall
of Empires. His discovery at the age of five-and-twenty that these
inspired works were not jumped at by the publishers with all the
eagerness they deserved, coincided in point of time with a severe hint
from his father that unless he went on with his legitimate profession he
might have to look elsewhere than at home for an allowance. Mr. Somerset
junior then awoke to realities, became intently practical, rushed back
to his dusty drawing-boards, and worked up the styles anew, with a view
of regularly starting in practice on the first day of the following
January.

It is an old story, and perhaps only deserves the light tone in which
the soaring of a young man into