r eyes beheld, all the days of their life. The age of
Homer is surrounded with darkness, his very personality with doubt. Not
so that of Pericles: and the day is coming when we shall confess, that
we have learned more of Greece out of the crumbled fragments of her
sculpture than even from her sweet singers or soldier historians. And
if indeed there be any profit in our knowledge of the past, or any joy
in the thought of being remembered hereafter, which can give strength
to present exertion, or patience to present endurance, there are two
duties respecting national architecture whose importance it is
impossible to overrate: the first, to render the architecture of the
day, historical; and, the second, to preserve, as the most precious of
inheritances, that of past ages.

It is in the first of these two directions that Memory may truly be
said to be the Sixth Lamp of Architecture; for it is in becoming
memorial or monumental that a true perfection is attained by civil and
domestic buildings; and this partly as they are, with such a view,
built in a more stable manner, and partly as their decorations are
consequently animated by a metaphorical or historical meaning.

As regards domestic buildings, there must always be a certain
limitation to views of this kind in the power, as well as in the
hearts, of men; still I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people
when their houses are built to last for one generation only. There is a
sanctity in a good man's house which cannot be renewed in every
tenement that rises on its ruins: and I believe that good men would
generally feel this; and that having spent their lives happily and
honourably, they would be grieved, at the close of them, to think that
the place of their earthly abode, which had seen, and seemed almost to
sympathize in, all their honour, their gladness, or their
suffering,--that this, with all the record it bare of them, and of all
material things that they had loved and ruled over, and set the stamp
of themselves upon--was to be swept away, as soon as there was room
made for them in the grave; that no respect was to be shown to it, no
affection felt for it, no good to be drawn from it by their children;
that though there was a monument in the church, there was no warm
monument in the hearth and house to them; that all that they ever
treasured was despised, and the places that had sheltered and comforted
them were dragged down to the dust. I say that a good man