nded to be suggestive rather than didactic; to
set you thinking and inquiring for yourselves, rather than learning
at second-hand from me. Some among my audience, I doubt not, will
neither need to be taught by me, nor to be stirred up to inquiry for
themselves. They are already, probably, antiquarians; already better
acquainted with the subject than I am. But they will, I hope,
remember that I am only trying to excite a general interest in that
very architecture in which they delight, and so to make the public do
justice to their labours. They will therefore, I trust--

Be to my faults a little blind,
Be to my virtues very kind--

and if my architectural theories do not seem to them correct in all
details--well-founded I believe them myself to be--remember that if
it be a light matter to me, or to the audience, whether any special
and pet fancy of mine should be exactly true or not; yet it is not a
light matter that my hearers should be awakened--and too many just
now need an actual awakening--to a right, pure, and wholesome
judgment on questions of art, especially when the soundness of that
judgment depends, as in this case, on sound judgments about human
history, as well as about natural objects.

Now, it befell me that, fresh from the tropic forests, and with their
forms hanging always as it were in the background of my eye, I was
impressed more and more vividly the longer I looked, with the
likeness of those forest forms to the forms of our own Cathedral of
Chester. The grand and graceful Chapter-house transformed itself
into one of those green bowers, which, once seen, and never to be
seen again, make one at once richer and poorer for the rest of life.
The fans of groining sprang from the short columns, just as do the
feathered boughs of the far more beautiful Maximiliana palm, and just
of the same size and shape; and met overhead, as I have seen them
meet, in aisles longer by far than our cathedral nave. The free
upright shafts, which give such strength, and yet such lightness, to
the mullions of each window, pierced upward through those curving
lines, as do the stems of young trees through the fronds of palm;
and, like them, carried the eye and the fancy up into the infinite,
and took off a sense of oppression and captivity which the weight of
the roof might have produced. In the nave, in the choir, the same
vision of the tropic forest haunted me. The fluted columns not only
resembled, but seemed