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In considering architecture, as in considering every other transcendental pursuit, we must take the existence of two things into account-namely, the set of the public mind and the occurrence of genius; and though we most urgently want genius in every branch of skill and knowledge, we have not the faintest notion of the causes of its production. The utmost we can do is to offer it ample opportunities of learning what it wants to learn, and to bestow our thanks and admiration upon its possessor and his works.

The other cause of excellence is the set of the public mind in a certain direction; but why it sets in that direction is at present unfathomable, though we may roughly indicate that its set is always towards those pursuits that promise power, wealth, and delight. We may, however, say with certainty that in this age it does not set in the direction of architecture. If the genius of all the great architects that ever lived were combined in one, and that one had the chance of showing it, the architecture that he would produce would have little or no effect on the public, for the public now gets more, in that direction, than it either desires or deserves almost for nothing, and is perfectly ungrateful. The set of the public mind is so important a factor that we can hardly overestimate its importance. Men whose turn of mind is in the line of that of the public generally decry all attempts at systematic teaching, and proclaim that all schools and universities are mere shoddy-making factories that turn out a colourable imitation from waste.

When in the past there has been a sudden demand by a city or a nation for some kind of knowledge or skill of which there was a deficient supply, the head of that nation or city had no better remedy to offer than the creation of schools, academies, and universities, where the requisite knowledge and skill should be taught or tested, and where it was hoped they might be learned. This was the method adopted by Constantine the Great when he chose Byzantium for the capital of the Roman Empire, and caused to be built there copies of the Senators' houses in Rome, and of their villas in other parts of Italy. We know that in his time the art of sculpture had so declined that the statues and bas-reliefs had to be taken from Trajan's Forum to form the adornments of his own triumphal arch, and that the sense of propriety had so decayed that there was no outcry against such folly; and though there was then a large influx of architects and skilled workmen into Byzantium, the work was so hastily and so unskilfully done that eighty domes are said to have fallen during his lifetime, and many buildings had to be pulled down in the time of his successors. So apparent was the want of competent architects and skilled workmen that he offered a premium to those who would have their sons brought up as architects, and to skilled workmen who would bring up their sons to their own trades. With this object he started schools in Italy and North Africa. May we not say that Santa Sophia, one of the masterpieces of the world, was the outcome of this teaching? After the irruption of the barbarians in the West there was a great want of both architects and skilled workmen, and the ecclesiastical authorities endeavoured to supply that want by founding schools in their abbeys and monaste: ies. Again, at the time of the Saracen irruption there was a dearth of architects and skilled workmen; for these energetic savages came at once from poverty into fabulous wealth, and wanted mosques for their new religion, and palaces for their Kalifs, Sultans, and great men; and this want was tried to be met by schools and universities connected with the mosques: and there was again the same want in the days of Charlemagne, and to meet these wants the same methods were adopted. I fancy that all the systems but one offered teaching to all who came, and, I presume, who showed some aptitude; but Constantine, who was certainly an able man, only offered his premiums for learning architecture to young men of eighteen years of age who had received a liberal education-whatever that meant then, or may mean now.

Looking at the enormous extent of the knowledge required by an architect, and the

almost antagonistic powers of mind required, would it not be better to confine architectural teaching to architecture?

As architecture is pre-eminently a constructive art, construction should certainly be its foundation--the very last thing that would be thought of now, for the æsthetic architect would leave that to the builder and the engineer. It seems ludicrous not to insist on an architect who is to build having such knowledge of statics as to know the proper method of resisting the force of wind, of water, and of earth, and the thrusts of arches, vaults, and domes. Statics would give us, too, important lessons in æsthetics, for it gives us the proper proportions of each part of a building when we know the height, the weight to be carried, and the strength of the material to be used. When these particulars are known and provided for, we may roughly say that we have only to accentuate the important part by mouldings, or have them adorned by the sculptor to make it into architecture.

The architectural student wants also to know how to plan conveniently and beautifully, to make his building wholesome, and finally to give it the shapes and ornaments that proclaim its destination, and are appropriate to that destination, and "all the rest is leather and prunello." The literary, goldsmithing, painting, and modelling architects of the Renaissance left us one pernicious legacy, for their aim was to imitate Roman architecture, and from their teaching the Gothic revivalists have wanted to imitate Gothic, and the Greek revivalists have wanted to imitate Greek, though the Italian Renaissance architects gave grace and artistic perfection to their Roman models.

This procedure of imitating the construction and æsthetic expression of a Pagan people who flourished 1,200 years before the Renaissance seems to me to be a mistaken one, for architecture is a progressive art, not only in the scientific part of construction, in the increase of material wants and the introduction of new materials, but also in the æsthetic part; for no two successive generations like exactly the same forms, nor are the emotions that should be raised exactly alike. You certainly should not ignore the advances made in the architecture of the immediate past. Between the Pagans of Ancient Rome and the Renaissance there had been Christian Roman architecture, the Byzantine, when the dome took so prominent a part; there had been Romanesque and Saracen architecture; there had been Gothic, which abandoned the opposing of inert mass to thrusts, and used counterpoise, and showed a constructive skill never equalled till this age of iron; Gothic, too, had tried to express in its churches its ideals of Knighthood and of Roman Catholic Christianity. It was certainly not wise to ignore former advances in construction, and it was hardly possible to go back to pure Roman Paganism, however hard the Renaissance men tried. If we want to advance we must follow the example of the mediavals; we must study deeply, observe accurately, reason logically, and be never deterred by failure, and endeavour to express the leading character of our time, which, I fancy, is the getting an insight into Nature's laws and applying them to our own wants. We must, too, endeavour to discover what in the heavens above, the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth we and our employers love to see embodied in our works, and how that embodiment should be expressed.

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In England we have artificially divided the constant increase of skill and knowledge, and the fluctuation in taste of the Gothic architects, into styles which we call "Early English," "Geometric," " Decorated," and "Perpendicular." I want you to observe that these so-called styles were gradual developments. The first Gothic architects developed the mouldings of the Romanesque; the grouping of two or more lancet windows under an arch suggested a hole in the spandrel afterwards cusped with the new Saracen feature, and so on; and as skill increased and taste decayed the tracery of the enormous perpendicular window grew mechanical and ugly. It is only by increase of æsthetical and constructive knowledge and the development

of necessary features that any characteristic features of our own can be stamped on our architecture.

When a race has had enough wit to invent mouldings on which the sunshine of its own country played the harmonies that it loved, how can these mouldings be transplanted into another country, with a different atmosphere and a different sunshine, and produce the same effect? And if they could, are these the precise effects we want to produce now?

Any one who can appreciate the beauty of mouldings, and has seen Greek architecture at Athens, cannot fail to observe how absolutely ineffective these mouldings are in the misty atmosphere of London, particularly when there is no sunshine. The only other architects who understood the art of moulding were those of the Middle Ages, after what we call Gothic was developed their mouldings are perfectly effective in misty weather, but are too coarse and hard when there is full sunshine, while they are at all times wanting in grace. Yet I may say that the art of moulding is as much neglected now as the science of statics.

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No one can give genius, nor does it seem in one man's power to turn the desires of mankind in the direction he desires. You can, however, try to drive away from the profession, by a thorough examination, all those who do not love architecture better than anything else; and though this love does not always ensure the possession of genuis, it mostly does. Having got the proper sort of men, you can see that they have that necessary knowledge and skill that would enable them to use the divine spark properly if they have it.

Ben Jonson repeats Horace's adage that "the poet is born and not made "; but he adds, for all that, a poet wants a good deal of making-and it is the same in all the fine arts. In painting and in sculpture the student with a passion for either does not come fully armed, like Athené from Zeus' brain; anatomy has to be laboriously acquired, as well as the power of drawing or modelling the perfect human form; the art of composition has to be learned, as well as what sculpture and painting can properly represent. Architects are not born with a knowledge of statics, nor of the strength of materials, nor of the art of planning, nor of how to express the emotions that each particular structure should evoke; though we now see ornaments from the palaces of the Cæsars, or from the boudoirs of Renaissance beauties, lavished on tailors' or oyster shops and on banks and insurance offices. I have seen the ghastly ornaments of Roman temples, bullocks' skulls, on a bank, but I looked on these as the symbol of the architect.

The Institute is a university-i.e. it does not teach but it examines, and informs students what they should know and where some of this information can be got. Amongst some the idea of teaching is almost a mania, and I admit that some things must be taught the pronunciation of foreign tongues, the use of a foil or an oar; but, as far as I know, the art of teaching is mainly non-existent. My experience of school teaching is this: I was put under a man who had mastered the subject I had to learn, and who was armed with a stick. He told me to learn a piece out of a book, and he allowed me what he thought was enough time to learn it in. If I did not know it, I was soundly beaten, and without doubt this is a great stimulus to exertion. Lucian, of the Dialogues, was supposed to have a taste for sculpture, but his master thought he had not striven enough, and as he had broken a piece of marble, too, gave him so severe a beating that he abandoned the art.

Unfortunately no real text-book has been written on architecture, though all but how to produce the emotions proper to any structure may be picked up from various books. Those architects who can produce the proper emotions have something else to do than to explain the means they employ, even if they could explain them. And the knowledge, too, of the means used to produce emotions will not give the power to produce them, or else all the real critics of æsthetics would be poets, painters, sculptors, architects, or musical composers as well. You

cannot suppose that those artists who have excited emotions have not tried to learn all they could from their predecessors. In the case of the poets at least we know that they have studied the works of their predecessors, and translated them when in foreign tongues, and paraphrased them when in their own; and though Horace's maxim is excellent, that "if you want to make your hearers cry, you must cry yourself," yet even when he did cry, he had to learn the precise mechanism for causing his hearers to weep. Architects must study and paraphrase those buildings and those members of buildings that have produced the proper emotions in them. An architect must also recollect that those who are to be moved by his building are not Greeks, Romans, mediævals, nor Italians of bygone ages, but the people of his own time. Still, if you can touch the master chords of humanity, they are not so very differently attuned now from what they were in the earliest times, or else we should not laugh at the wit of Aristophanes, of Rabelais, of Swift, or of Molière; nor cry over the pathos of Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, Dante, or Shakespeare.

We can at least see that an architectural student has the knowledge that he cannot properly do without, and we shall find this alone will have a very good effect on the profession; but it is almost impossible to divest men's minds of cant. The student is asked to know all sorts of things, some of which are interesting, some pleasant, and some dull, that have no bearing on architecture. It is interesting enough to know that hazel-nuts were shipped at Barcelona and currants at Patras, but we use neither dry nuts nor currants in architecture; it is pleasant enough to understand Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Sanscrit ; French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic; but they are no more, architectural arts than the broad-sword exercise or being able to shoot flying. It is interesting enough to know who built the Parthenon, or the Pantheon, or King's Cross, but it is no more architecture than playing on the fiddle or dancing the polka.

We believe that Nature perfectly adapts all her living works to the actions they have to perform without waste of material; and while some are exquisitely beautiful, some majestic, and some comic, others are commonplace, and some are repulsive, hideous, or frightful; but they all have character. It is only by studying Nature's works and former buildings, and deducing laws from them, that we can hope to cultivate that sense which makes us like one form and detest another; so I think that such a study is necessary for those who wish to become architects; for though a knowledge of statics will make our buildings safe and prevent a want of due ratio between the parts, we must trust to a cultivated eye, till the laws are discovered, to make them beautiful, majestic, or sublime. We should, I think, make our students first design in old-world materials, wood, brick, stone, and marble, so that their designs can be compared with the existing successful monuments; but we have new materials which have to be brought within the pale of architecture.

In my opinion we cannot do better than make students design in cast iron when they have succeeded in designing in the old-world materials. It is too expensive a material to disregard its statical conditions. It is difficult to arrange a column or a stanchion so that its capital may securely carry a heavy superstructure with a large base. It is difficult to make the base of this column or stanchion wide enough to safely transmit the weight it bears on to a foundation of much softer material; there are difficulties in the design of mouldings and floral ornament that can be cast; and there are absolutely no examples to imitate, so that the knowledge, care, skill, and invention of the student are called into play. We cannot believe that the ingenious Medieval architects would have foregone the use of such valuable and powerful materials as wrought iron, cast iron, and steel on account of Mr. Ruskin's objection that they were not mentioned as building materials in the Bible.

It may be truly said that nothing can be effected in a structural art like architec

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ture by talking; but when a man is lost in a wood, and you can direct him to the road out of it, you have done him most effectual service. Architecture has been in a wood since the fifteenth century, and it can never progress until it gets out of this wood. The intelligent architectural student wants to know the mark he is to aim at, and how he may hit it; and I am afraid the general opinion would be that he is to learn to sketch in perspective; and when he asks what he should sketch, he would be told everything that appears to him interesting, striking, or beautiful, because when he gets into practice he will find that the public may ask him to build in any style the world has known. A good instance of the ignorant instructing the wise! He should be told that he has first to learn how to construct, and that the aim of architecture is to make of each building an organism like Nature's, fitted to fulfil its duties as perfectly as possible without waste of material, and to make it properly tell the tale of its purpose or purposes, and that if sculpture and painting can be afforded, he is to use them to tell its tale more completely.

When the Associates' curriculum is amended I would reduce the examinations to two, a matriculation examination and a final one, for two reasons: first, because time would be saved; and, secondly, so that each student might keep up the knowledge and skill he had acquired. Professor De Morgan used to say that when an examination was passed, the students thought all the knowledge required for passing it might be forgotten, and looked on his asking again for subjects they had once passed as a fraud, as if they were asked to pay a second time when they had the receipt for the first payment. The final examination should include a certificate that the candidate has acted as clerk of the works on some building for at least six months, to familiarise him with real work, and to impress on his mind that it is building and not drawing that is wanted. These amendments would greatly improve the condition of architecture; but architecture would be more improved if there were an examination for Fellows as well. The complaint is that there is a dearth of Fellows, and a proposition is made like that adopted by the giver of the Scripture feast, that we should send into the highways and by-ways and compel them to come in. There would surely be no need of compulsion if it were felt to be an advantage and an honour to be a Fellow. It has been said that eventually every Fellow must have been an Associate, but the present conditions of the Fellowship offer a way to escape examination. No one, I imagine, objects to see really distinguished architects being admitted by acclamation; but at present there are only three real qualifications for the Fellowship-that the candidate is thirty years of age, is honest, and has been seven years in practice; though it is true that the Council look at the drawings turned out of his office. Some one said of a Prime Minister in Cobbett's day that he was honest; to which Cobbett replied that no one would take a footman if honesty were his only qualification, and put this question: "Shall that be the only qualification for a Prime Minister?" No one can say that physicians or surgeons do not desire and do not strive to be Fellows of their respective colleges, or that both are not better for having learned the necessary elements of their profession. The only objection to a proper examination of Fellows is that it is absurd to expect it from men of thirty years of age who have been seven years in practice. The physicians and surgeons saw the force of this; and though the examination may take place at twenty-one years of age, the title cannot be assumed until they are twenty-five. The Fellows' examination should only be more complete than that of the Associates; and the candidate should have a certificate of having acted as a clerk of the works for a year, and made out the necessary full-size diagrams for the work on the floor.

I have only one remark to make before I give my peroration. I am rather surprised that architects do not see that degrees of excellence are possible in architecture; or, if they do see it, that they do not act on their convictions. The greatest living architects are contented