s again, describing the general effect of Henry the Seventh's
unrivalled chapel,--'The very walls are wrought into universal ornament;
encrusted with tracery, and scooped into niches, crowded with the statues
of saints and martyrs. Stone seems, by the cunning labour of the chisel,
to have been robbed of its weight and density; suspended aloft as if by
magic; and the fretted roof achieved with the wonderful minuteness and
airy security of a cobweb.'

'Dusty splendour,' 'airy security,' epithets so unexpected, and yet so
felicitous, as to be seemingly accidental. Such are the tokens of that
highest art, which is--to conceal its own existence. After such speech
as that, what have I to tell you of the great old Abbey?

Yet there are one or two things, I dare to say, which Washington Irving
would have written differently had he visited Westminster, not forty
years ago, but now.

I think, in the first place, that if he visited the great Abbey now, he
would not have noticed that look of dilapidation at which he hints--and
perhaps had a right to hint--some forty years ago. Dilapidation, dirt,
and negligence are as hateful to us now, as to the builder of the newest
house outside. We too, for more than a generation past, have felt, in
common with the rest of England and with all the nations of Northern
Europe, that awakened reverence for Mediaeval Art and Mediaeval History,
which is--for good and for evil--the special social phenomenon of our
times; the natural and, on the whole, useful countercheck to that extreme
of revolutionary feeling which issues--as it did in Paris but three years
ago--in utter hatred and renunciation of the past, and destruction of its
monuments.

To preserve, to restore, and, if not, to copy, as a sort of filial duty,
the buildings which our forefathers have left us, is now held to be the
very mark of cultivation and good taste in Britain. It may be that we
carry it too far; that by a servile and Chinese exactness of imitation we
are crippling what originality of genius may exist among our draughtsmen,
sculptors, architects. But we at least confess thereby that we cannot
invent and create as could our ancestors five hundred years ago; and as
long as that is the case it is more wise in us--as in any people--to
exhaust the signification and power of the past, and to learn all we can
from older schools of art and thought ere we attempt novelties of our own
which, I confess freely, usually issue in