rt are chiefly the characteristics of youth; so that nearly
all men as they advance in years, and some even from their childhood
upwards, must be appealed to, if at all, by a direct and substantial
art, brought before their daily observation and connected with their
daily interests. No form of art answers these conditions so well as
architecture, which, as it can receive help from every character of mind
in the workman, can address every character of mind in the spectator;
forcing itself into notice even in his most languid moments, and
possessing this chief and peculiar advantage, that it is the property of
all men. Pictures and statues may be jealously withdrawn by their
possessors from the public gaze, and to a certain degree their safety
requires them to be so withdrawn; but the outsides of our houses belong
not so much to us as to the passer-by, and whatever cost and pains we
bestow upon them, though too often arising out of ostentation, have at
least the effect of benevolence.

Sec. XXXV. If, then, considering these things, any of my readers should
determine, according to their means, to set themselves to the revival
of a healthy school of architecture in England, and wish to know in few
words how this may be done, the answer is clear and simple. First, let
us cast out utterly whatever is connected with the Greek, Roman, or
Renaissance architecture, in principle or in form. We have seen above,
that the whole mass of the architecture, founded on Greek and Roman
models, which we have been in the habit of building for the last three
centuries, is utterly devoid of all life, virtue, honorableness, or
power of doing good. It is base, unnatural, unfruitful, unenjoyable, and
impious. Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralyzed
in its old age, yet making prey in its dotage of all the good and living
things that were springing around it in their youth, as the dying and
desperate king, who had long fenced himself so strongly with the towers
of it, is said to have filled his failing veins with the blood of
children;[55] an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists
of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and Sybarites of its
inhabitants; an architecture in which intellect is idle, invention
impossible, but in which all luxury is gratified, and all insolence
fortified;--the first thing we have to do is to cast it out, and shake
the dust of it from our feet for ever. Whatever has any connexion