ire reduced, the thickness of walls diminished, and
stone arches omitted." (Remarks, &c., by A. Welby Pugin: Dolman, 1850.)

Is that so? Phidias can niche himself into the corner of a pediment, and
Raffaelle expatiate within the circumference of a clay platter; but
Pugin is inexpressible in less than a cathedral? Let his ineffableness
be assured of this, once for all, that no difficulty or restraint ever
happened to a man of real power, but his power was the more manifested
in the contending with, or conquering it; and that there is no field so
small, no cranny so contracted, but that a great spirit can house and
manifest itself therein. The thunder that smites the Alp into dust, can
gather itself into the width of a golden wire. Whatever greatness there
was in you, had it been Buonarroti's own, you had room enough for it in
a single niche: you might have put the whole power of it into two feet
cube of Caen stone. St. George's was not high enough for want of money?
But was it want of money that made you put that blunt, overloaded,
laborious ogee door into the side of it? Was it for lack of funds that
you sunk the tracery of the parapet in its clumsy zigzags? Was it in
parsimony that you buried its paltry pinnacles in that eruption of
diseased crockets? or in pecuniary embarrassment that you set up the
belfry foolscaps, with the mimicry of dormer windows, which nobody can
ever reach nor look out of? Not so, but in mere incapability of better
things.

I am sorry to have to speak thus of any living architect; and there is
much in this man, if he were rightly estimated, which one might both
regard and profit by. He has a most sincere love for his profession, a
heartily honest enthusiasm for pixes and piscinas; and though he will
never design so much as a pix or a piscina thoroughly well, yet better
than most of the experimental architects of the day. Employ him by all
means, but on small work. Expect no cathedrals from him; but no one, at
present, can design a better finial. That is an exceedingly beautiful
one over the western door of St. George's; and there is some spirited
impishness and switching of tails in the supporting figures at the
imposts. Only do not allow his good designing of finials to be employed
as an evidence in matters of divinity, nor thence deduce the
incompatibility of Protestantism and art. I should have said all that I
have said above, of artistical apostasy, if Giotto had been now living
in Florenc