ows side by side in the
same streets, and still be interested by them. Why, if I were to say the
same thing over and over again, for the single hour you are going to let
me talk to you, would you listen to me? and yet you let your architects
_do_ the same thing over and over again for three centuries, and expect
to be interested by their architecture; with a farther disadvantage on
the side of the builder, as compared with the speaker, that my wasted
words would cost you but little, but his wasted stones have cost you no
small part of your incomes.

[Footnote 1: Including York Place, and Picardy Place, but not counting
any window which has moldings.]

[Illustration: PLATE II. (Fig. 2)]

4. "Well, but," you still think within yourselves, "it is not _right_
that architecture should be interesting. It is a very grand thing, this
architecture, but essentially unentertaining. It is its duty to be dull,
it is monotonous by law: it cannot be correct and yet amusing."

Believe me, it is not so. All things that are worth doing in art, are
interesting and attractive when they are done. There is no law of right
which consecrates dullness. The proof of a thing's being right is, that
it has power over the heart; that it excites us, wins us, or helps us. I
do not say that it has influence over all, but it has over a large
class, one kind of art being fit for one class, and another for another;
and there is no goodness in art which is independent of the power of
pleasing. Yet, do not mistake me; I do not mean that there is no such
thing as neglect of the best art, or delight in the worst, just as many
men neglect nature, and feed upon what is artificial and base; but I
mean, that all good art has the _capacity of pleasing_, if people will
attend to it; that there is no law against its pleasing; but, on the
contrary, something wrong either in the spectator or the art, when it
ceases to please. Now, therefore, if you feel that your present school
of architecture is unattractive to you, I say there is something wrong,
either in the architecture or in you; and I trust you will not think I
mean to flatter you when I tell you, that the wrong is _not_ in you, but
in the architecture. Look at this for a moment (_fig._ 2); it is a
window actually existing--a window of an English domestic building[2]--a
window built six hundred years ago. You will not tell me you have no
pleasure in looking at this; or that you could not, by any possibility,