ime to the old work, and
fill with their dainty, branching tracery the severe, round-headed,
Norman openings of Peterborough and Gloucester? Did fifteenth-century
men do thirteenth-century glass when they had to refill a window of that
date?" No. Nor must you. Never imitate, but graft your own work on to
the old, reverently, and only changing from it so far forth as you, like
itself, have also a living tradition, springing from mastery of
craft--naturally, spontaneously, and inevitably.

Whether we shall ever again have such a tradition running throughout all
the arts is a thing that cannot possibly be foretold. But three things
we may be quite sure of.

First, that if it comes it will not be by way of any imitative revival
of a past style;

Second, that it will be in harmony with the principles of Nature; and

Third, that it will be founded upon the crafts, and brought about by
craftsmen working in it with their own hands, on the materials of
architecture, designing only what they themselves can execute, and
giving employment to others only in what they themselves can do.

A word about each of these three conditions.

In the course of the various attempted revivals in architecture that
have taken place during the past sixty years, it has been frequently
urged both by writers and architects that we should agree to revive some
_one_ style of ancient art that might again become a national style of
architecture. It would, indeed, no doubt be better, if we must speak in
a dead language, to agree to use only one, instead of our present
confusion of tongues: but what, after all, is the adopting of this
principle at all but to engage once again in the replanting of a
full-grown tree--the mistake of the Renaissance and the Gothic revival
repeated? Such things never take firm root or establish healthy growth
which lives and goes on of its own vitality. They never succeed in
obtaining a natural, national sympathy and acceptance. The movement is a
scholarly and academic one, and the art so remains. The reaction against
it is always a return to materials, and almost always the first result
of this is a revival of simplicity. People get tired of being surrounded
with elaborate mouldings and traceries and other architectural features,
which are not the natural growth of their own day but of another day
long since dead, which had other thoughts and moods, feelings and
aspirations. "Let us have straightforward masonry and simple