erhaps, that I am using terms unjustifiable in violence.
They would, indeed, be unjustifiable, if, spoken from this chair, they
were violent at all. They are, unhappily, temperate and
accurate,--except in shortcoming of blame. For we are not only impotent
to restore, but strong to defile, the work of past ages. Of the
impotence, take but this one, utterly humiliatory, and, in the full
meaning of it, ghastly, example. We have lately been busy embanking, in
the capital of the country, the river which, of all its waters, the
imagination of our ancestors had made most sacred, and the bounty of
nature most useful. Of all architectural features of the metropolis,
that embankment will be, in future, the most conspicuous; and in its
position and purpose it was the most capable of noble adornment.

For that adornment, nevertheless, the utmost which our modern poetical
imagination has been able to invent, is a row of gas-lamps. It has,
indeed, farther suggested itself to our minds as appropriate to
gas-lamps set beside a river, that the gas should come out of fishes'
tails; but we have not ingenuity enough to cast so much as a smelt or a
sprat for ourselves; so we borrow the shape of a Neapolitan marble,
which has been the refuse of the plate and candlestick shops in every
capital of Europe for the last fifty years. We cast _that_ badly, and
give lustre to the ill-cast fish with lacquer in imitation of bronze. On
the base of their pedestals, towards the road, we put for
advertisement's sake, the initials of the casting firm; and, for farther
originality and Christianity's sake, the caduceus of Mercury; and to
adorn the front of the pedestals towards the river, being now wholly at
our wit's end, we can think of nothing better than to borrow the
door-knocker which--again for the last fifty years--has disturbed and
decorated two or three millions of London street-doors; and magnifying
the marvellous device of it, a lion's head with a ring in its mouth
(still borrowed from the Greek), we complete the embankment with a row
of heads and rings, on a scale which enables them to produce, at the
distance at which only they can be seen, the exact effect of a row of
sentry boxes.

84. Farther. In the very centre of the city, and at the point where the
Embankment commands a view of Westminster Abbey on one side and of St.
Paul's on the other--that is to say, at precisely the most important and
stately moment of its whole course--it has to pa