cipal entrance
so utterly ghastly and oppressive; and it is as weak as it is ghastly.
The huge horizontal lintel above the door is already split right
through. But you are not aware of a thousandth part of the evil: the
pieces of building that you _see_ are all carefully done; it is in the
parts that are to be concealed by paint and plaster that the bad
building of the day is thoroughly committed. The main mischief lies in
the strange devices that are used to support the long horizontal cross
beams of our larger apartments and shops, and the framework of unseen
walls; girders and ties of cast iron, and props and wedges, and laths
nailed and bolted together, on marvelously scientific principles; so
scientific, that every now and then, when some tender reparation is
undertaken by the unconscious householder, the whole house crashes into
a heap of ruin, so total, that the jury which sits on the bodies of the
inhabitants cannot tell what has been the matter with it, and returns a
dim verdict of accidental death.

[Footnote 3: Plate I. On this subject, see "The Builder," vol. xi.
p. 709.]

7. Did you read the account of the proceedings at the Crystal Palace at
Sydenham the other day? Some dozen of men crushed up among the splinters
of the scaffolding in an instant, nobody knew why. All the engineers
declare the scaffolding to have been erected on the best
principles,--that the fall of it is as much a mystery as if it had
fallen from heaven, and were all meteoric stones. The jury go to
Sydenham and look at the heap of shattered bolts and girders, and come
back as wise as they went. Accidental death! Yes, verily; the lives of
all those dozen of men had been hanging for months at the mercy of a
flaw in an inch or two of cast iron. Very accidental indeed! Not the
less pitiable. I grant it not to be an easy thing to raise scaffolding
to the height of the Crystal Palace without incurring some danger, but
that is no reason why your houses should all be nothing but scaffolding.
The common system of support of walls over shops is now nothing but
permanent scaffolding; part of iron, part of wood, part of brick; in
its skeleton state awful to behold; the weight of three or four stories
of wall resting sometimes on two or three pillars of the size of gas
pipes, sometimes on a single cross beam of wood, laid across from party
wall to party wall in the Greek manner. I have a vivid recollection at
this moment of a vast heap of splinters