of the probable increase in the value of the premises. Mr. Vulliamy's estimate was £61,152 for the cost of removal of Middle Row, and £20,000 for the cost of acquiring the houses in High Holborn, or a total of £81,152, an increase of 29 per cent. on the former valuation. Mr. Vulliamy, in his report to the Standing Committee of the Board, expressed the opinion that it would not be advisable to touch the property on the south side of Holborn, the ground floors of the houses being let to tenants having valuable business interests, and the upper floors to solicitors of Staple Inn; and he further reported that the new line of frontage between Tennis Court and the entrance gateway to Staple Inn, suggested by Mr. Marrable, would not in his opinion be equivalent to the cost incurred, and that "it would be questionable in point of taste to destroy one of the most picturesque examples of the half-timber style now existent in the Metropolis." Mr. Marrable's new line of frontage would have destroyed the western half of Staple Inn, and it is well that the public should know to whom it is indebted for the preservation of this interesting relic. The Metropolitan Board obtained an Act of Parliament authorising the improvement, which was carried out at a cost of £66,559 18s. 3d., and the widened roadway was thrown open to the public on 24th December 1867. Holywell Priory, Shoreditch. From W. A. LONGMORE [F] Upon reading the interesting account of Holywell Priory, Shoreditch, by Mr. E. W. Hudson, in the JOURNAL, it has occurred to me that he might perhaps like to know that I have in my office [7, Great Alie Street, Whitechapel, E.] the upper part of the figure of a bishop, carved in Purbeck marble, which was found some years ago in digging the foundation of a house in New Inn Yard, probably part of the site of the Priory; unfortunately, the head could not be found, although searched for. The work is well executed, and might possibly be a portion of a monument to the Bishop Gravesend mentioned in the Paper. Mr. Hudson is welcome to examine it if he wishes, or I could send him a photograph of it. I may also mention that, having frequently to pass that way while the Great Eastern Railway was being constructed, I once noticed two fine stone corbels, with heads of a king and queen, which were being used as spur stones to a gate leading into the works. I visited the place again shortly afterwards, intending to try and obtain these corbels by purchase, if possible; but they had disappeared, and I could learn nothing about them. I should hope that they have been preserved, as they seemed to be fine works. I took them at the time to be intended for Edward III. and his Queen. MINUTES. IV. At a Special General Meeting held Monday, 13th December 1897, at 8 p.m., Professor Aitchison, A.R.A., President, in the Chair, the Minutes of the Special General Meeting held 29th November 1897 [p. 74] having been taken as read and signed as correct, on the motion of the President it was RESOLVED, nem. con., that the following Resolution passed at the Special General Meeting of the 29th November be confirmed, viz.-" That in order that the Council of the Royal Institute may remain in office until the close of the last General Meeting in June of the year following that in which they were elected, the following alteration be made in Bylaw 30-viz. that in the last line but one of the final clause the word 'last' be substituted for 'first.'" The Special General Meeting then terminated. At the Fourth General Meeting (Ordinary) of the Session, held at the conclusion of the Special General Meeting above referred to, Professor Aitchison, A.R.A., President, in the Chair, the Minutes of the General Meeting (Business) held Monday, 29th November 1897 [p. 74], were taken as read and signed as correct. The decease was announced of the following membersviz. Octavius Hansard, elected Associate in 1848, Fellow in 1860; John Loughborough Pearson, R.A., elected Fellow in 1860, Royal Gold Medallist 1880; William Stephens Cross, Fellow, elected 1882; Joseph Battye, Associate, elected 1881; Arthur James Forge, Associate, elected 1894. In reference to the death of Mr Pearson, the President having paid a personal tribute to the estimable qualities of the deceased, and referred to his distinguished work as an architect, it was RESOLVED, that the Royal Institute of British Architects desires to place on record its admiration of the magnificent works of architecture carried out by the late John Loughborough Pearson, R.A., Fellow, and to express its feeling of profound sorrow for the loss sustained by the death of so gifted an artist; also that the Institute do offer to the family of the deceased an expression of sincere condolence with them in their bereavement. The following Associates attending for the first time since their election were formally admitted and signed the Register, viz. James Richard Fleming, Richard Henry Ernest Hill, Percy Morris, and William Stanley Bates. The following candidates for membership, found by the Council to be eligible and qualified according to the Charter and By-laws, and admitted by them to candidature, were recommended for election, viz.: As FELLOW, Arthur Alderson France (Bradford); As HON. CORR. MEMBERS, Leopold Eidlitz (New York) and Victor Dumortier (Brussels). THE REPORT ON THE THIRD SERIES OF BRICKWORK TESTS conducted under the direction of the Science Standing Committee having been read by Mr. William C. Street [F.], Mr. Max. Clarke [A.] followed with a statement explanatory of the method of carrying out the experiments, and calling attention to the practical value of many of the results arrived at, and further, with the aid of limelight views, gave a description of the behaviour of the walls during compression. Professor Unwin [H.A.], F.R.S., having delivered some critical remarks on the way the Reports had been drawn up, and given his views as to the teaching of the results, a discussion ensued, at the conclusion of which a vote of thanks was passed by acclamation to Sir Wm. Arrol and Mr. H. F. Donaldson [H.A.] for the valuable assistance they had afforded the Committee, and to the members of the Sub-Committee who had directed the operations, and reported and tabulated the results. The proceedings then closed and the Meeting separated at 10 P.M. T THE LATE JOHN LOUGHBOROUGH PEARSON, R.A. the future and its judgment a true estimate of the work of a great artist and his influence upon his times must be left. Especially is this the case when he has lived in the days of Eclecticism; not less so, when the quality of his production has grown and gathered up in freshness, vigour, and grace to the very close of a life of fourscore years, and when the hand which has shown the way to so many has only just laid down the pencil. Only yesterday John Loughborough Pearson was working amongst us-one of us in very deed-even at his great age, and after his many and great achievements, as to his life's work, still young -cut off in the very vigour of his intellect and fulness of his power. Although it is now too soon to form a final estimate of him, we may well look back into the character of the man and his methods. That he was first a disciple and afterwards, in works not words, a leader in the so-called Gothic Revival-in so far at least that he was a builder of great Gothic churches--must be attributed to the mere chance of the time into which he was born; for an intimate knowledge of the man himself led to the firm conviction that to him style was but the clothing of great architectural ideas-that the indispensable scholarship and inexhaustible knowledge of tradition were the means only towards the expression of such ideas-that at the very height of the great, now almost historical, battle of the styles, he, wellnigh alone of his school, kept a balanced mind. It is a fact that a great classical or renascence work was, in his latter years, a-perhaps somewhat vaguely-cherished ambition of the creator of Truro Cathedral and St. Augustine's, Kilburn. Had such an opportunity offered, there can be no doubt that we should have had, from his remarkable sense for proportion and composition, from his intimate knowledge of detail, a building as full of refinement, character, and repose as the best of those in that mediæ val manner which he made peculiarly his own. It was, perhaps, from this view of architecture as a comprehensive art rather than an aggregation of divergent styles, of which one should take precedence of all, that his work is to be differentiated from that of his most eminent contemporaries of the Revival. Even at a time, now fortunately almost historical, when straying from pure imitation of the past was apt to be regarded as an architectural sin, or mark of ignorance, traces of an individuality are to be found in the compositions of his earliest period, which may be said to extend roughly from his first church at Elleker, in 1843, to the conception of St. Peter's, Vauxhall, in 1861, the first of his new vaulted structures. It was this new delight he seems to have found in the stone groined roof, in dealing with which he became the acknowledged master of his time, that developed his full powers and produced St. John's, Red Lion Square, and other well-known kindred structures, where we find not only a complete mastery over forms of mediæval art, Third Series. Vol. V. No. 5.-8 Jan, 1898. R FIG. 1.-DALTON-HOLME CHURCH, YORKSHIRE (1858). (From a water-colour drawing.) but a sympathy with its nature and insight into its methods, all made subservient to modern needs, and, hardest of all, to the demands of modern economy. Of these works of striking individuality and merit, while they have not been surpassed-not often rivalled -in their expression of the highest mediæval ideals of architectural fitness, it is still to be said that they are essentially of the age and of the man, and as such they will take their place in the history of Art. Born in Brussels in 1817, Mr. Pearson was articled at the early age of fourteen to Ignatius Bonomi, in Durham. His grandfather was a wellknown lawyer of that city, while his father, William Pearson, was an etcher and water-colourist, who shows a distinct taste for the picturesque and romantic in architecture just at the period of the romantic movement in literature which characterised the early years of the century. In 1824 he published a series of etchings, Picturesque Views, and a little later a more important volume, Antiquities of Salop. His technical skill with the etcher's needle exhibits no great aptitude, but the subjects, which are almost exclusively architectural, are rendered with evident appreciation of form and contour, and no little taste in selection. Here no doubt was the germ of what was to make the son famous. But the young architect must have had in his early years an infinite capacity for painstaking study and application. The great Cathedral of Durham, culminating in its Nine Altars, was there to his hand, and every spare hour from office work was spent in and around its walls. His veneration for it never grew less throughout his long life, and it is not a little interesting to find him seeking the motive for the choir triforium of his own Cathedral of Truro at the source of his first inspirations. The grand proportions of the Chapel of the Nine Altars strike all beholders, and, modest and reticent though he was in all things concerning himself, it was a treat sometimes to hear him speak with all the enthusiasm of youth over his early joy in this great structure. The Yorkshire abbeys and churches were also the subjects of his constant study and attention. He had at all times an extraordinary aptitude for gauging and absorbing the salient points for study and interest in any building. In early days his education was amplified by numerous careful and accurate sketches, drawn with an excellent line, often vigorously washed in, and accompanied by full dimensions and sometimes by apt verbal descriptions. Those were the days when photographs were not, and books were comparatively scarce. But his industry seems to have been untiring, and he drew from every source, for wherever possible books and plates were also borrowed, and he was not content with the mere reading and study of these. Every plate of value was carefully copied, not a detail of interest escaped him. These drawings were mounted with his own sketches into large scrap-books, and exhibit a happily chosen series of designs and details of every possible description, things great and small, artistic and constructional, of all styles, English and foreign. Nothing in which an architect should be proficient is omitted from these admirable and comprehensive studies, and the source of Mr. Pearson's indefatigable personal attention and love for every detail of the furniture and equipment as well as of his buildings themselves is thus not far to seek. As an increasing practice brought the means, he formed the nucleus of a fine architectural library which continued always his hobby and his recreation, and with every volume of which he was intimate, and could turn in a moment to plate or page bearing upon any subject of immediate interest or conversation. This was noticeably the case in regard to the cathedrals and abbeys in whose history and development he was deeply versed, and for the stones of which he had all the love and feeling of the most pronounced antiquary. A study of a process of self-education here outlined, from which devolved such eminent results and so fine a character, is interesting in these days of teaching, text-books, and examination tests, although it has little bearing upon the fact that a genuine feeling for architecture, backed by irrepressible diligence, will surely find its own way to the front. In Mr. Pearson's case that innate power of appreciation and sympathy already alluded to had undoubtedly given him a keener insight than most of his fellows into the more abstruse causes and effects and methods of construction in which lies that indescribable factor "quality" in architecture, quite apart from correctness of form or detail. In nothing is this more apparent than in his vaulting. The carefully studied plan of the ribs upon the cap, so primarily essential to a successful treatment, the best pitch of the diagonals and transverse ribs to give a well-proportioned rise as viewed from below, their relative section and importance, differing so much in different surroundings, the awkward opposition of optical lines their conjunction is ever ready to set up if proper corrections are not warily introduced, and, not the least important of many intricacies, the constructional value and treatment without crudeness of the horizontal beds of the springers-all the factors in successful vaulting-he had learned to control so readily that no space was too irregular or awkward to induce the least appearance of effort in the vault he threw across it. He had mastered equally that mysterious intricacy of parts which is the charm, and often the wonder, of the later canopy and decorative niche work, frequently so bald and hard in modern efforts at reproduction. His plans In his procedure the plan always received the first and fullest consideration. present a great variety, always showing some characteristic treatment dependent upon the conditions imposed, as, for example, at Truro, where the whole conception has its origin in the happy incorporation of south aisle of the old parish church. His western porches are frequently ingenious, and the management of the choir and the sanctuary specially interesting. In his larger structures the morning chapel has an important place, and is treated so as to |