e same style will invariably be failures,
unless they be copies. It is utter absurdity to talk of building Greek
edifices now; no man ever will, or ever can, who does not believe in the
Greek mythology; and, precisely by so much as he diverges from the
technicality of strict copyism, he will err. But we ought to have pieces
of Greek architecture, as we have reprints of the most valuable records,
and it is better to build a new Parthenon than to set up the old one.
Let the dust and the desolation of the Acropolis be undisturbed forever;
let them be left to be the school of our moral feelings, not of our
mechanical perceptions; the line and rule of the prying carpenter should
not come into the quiet and holy places of the earth. Elsewhere, we may
build marble models for the education of the national mind and eye; but
it is useless to think of adapting the architecture of the Greek to the
purposes of the Frank; it never has been done, and never will be. We
delight, indeed, in observing the rise of such a building as La
Madeleine: beautiful, because accurately copied; useful, as teaching the
eye of every passer-by. But we must not think of its purpose; it is
wholly unadapted for Christian worship; and were it as bad Greek as our
National Gallery, it would be equally unfit.

The mistake of our architects in general is, that they fancy they are
speaking good English by speaking bad Greek. We wish, therefore, that
copying were more in vogue than it is. But imitation, the endeavor to be
Gothic, or Tyrolese, or Venetian, without the slightest grain of Gothic
or Venetian feeling; the futile effort to splash a building into age, or
daub it into dignity, to zigzag it into sanctity, or slit it into
ferocity, when its shell is neither ancient nor dignified, and its
spirit neither priestly nor baronial,--this is the degrading vice of the
age; fostered, as if man's reason were but a step between the brains of
a kitten and a monkey, in the mixed love of despicable excitement and
miserable mimicry.

If the English have no imagination, they should not scorn to be
commonplace; or rather they should remember that poverty cannot be
disguised by beggarly borrowing, that it may be ennobled by calm
independence. Our national architecture never will improve until our
population are generally convinced that in this art, as in all others,
they cannot seem what they cannot be. The scarlet coat or the
turned-down collar, which the obsequious portra