lked to and fro amply, needing elbow-room for their
dignity and their finery, and by night were borne in chairs, singly?
And those queer little places of worship, those stucco chapels, with
their very secular little columns, their ample pews, and their
negligible altars over which one saw the Lion and the Unicorn fighting,
as who should say, for the Cross--did they not breathe all the
inimitable Erastianism of their period? In qua te qaero proseucha, my
Lady Powderbox? Alas! every one of your tabernacles is dust now--dust
turned to mud by the tears of the ghost of the Rev. Charles Honeyman,
and by my own tears.... I have strayed again into sentiment. Back to
the point--which is that the new houses and streets in Mayfair mean
nothing. Let me show you Mount Street. Let me show you that airy
stretch of sham antiquity, and defy you to say that it symbolises, how
remotely soever, the spirit of its time. Mount Street is typical of the
new Mayfair. And the new Mayfair is typical of the new London. In the
height of these new houses, in the width of these new roads, future
students will find, doubtless, something characteristic of this
pressing and bustling age. But from the style of the houses he will
learn nothing at all. The style might mean anything; and means,
therefore, nothing. Original architecture is a lost art in England; and
an art that is once lost is never found again. The Edvardian Era cannot
be commemorated in its architecture.

Erection of new buildings robs us of the past and gives us in exchange
nothing of the present. Consequently, the excuse put by me into the
gaping mouth of the average Londoner cannot be accepted. I had no idea
that my case was such a good one. Having now vindicated on grounds of
patriotic utility that which I took to be a mere sentimental prejudice,
I may be pardoned for dragging 'beauty' into the question. The new
buildings are not only uninteresting through lack of temporal and local
significance: they are also hideous. With all his learned eclecticism,
the new architect seems unable to evolve a fake that shall be pleasing
to the eye. Not at all pleasing is a mad hotch-potch of early Victorian
hospital, Jacobean manor-house, Venetian palace, and bride-cake in
Gunter's best manner. Yet that, apparently, is the modern English
architect's pet ideal. Even when he confines himself to one manner, the
result (even if it be in itself decent) is made horrible by vicinity to
the work of a rival wh