Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/80

 to prevail over classical precedents, or the contrary if the reactionary element be allowed to obtain the preference.

Below these there is another class of men who have but little sympathy with Greece or Rome, and still less with mediæval monasticism or feudalism, but who in their own strong sense seem inclined to take a more reasonable view of the matter, and these men are now erecting at Manchester and in other cities of the North a series of warehouses and other buildings designed wholly with reference to their uses, and ornamented only in their construction, and which consequently are—as far as their utilitarian purposes will allow—as satisfactory as anything of former days. Eastward of Temple Bar there are many buildings arising on the same system, and with a little more experience they promise to be as satisfactory as those in the North.

In civil engineering, the lowest and most prosaic branch of architectural art, our progress has been brilliant and rapid. Of this no better example can be given than the four great bridges erected over the Thames. The old bridges of Westminster and Blackfriars, and those of Waterloo and London, were erected at nearly equal intervals during one century, and the steady progress which they exhibit is greater than that of almost any similar branch of art during any equal period of time.

In this department our progress is so undeniable that we saw old London Bridge removed without regret, though it was a work of the same age and of the same men who built all our greatest and best cathedrals, and in its own line was quite as perfect and as beautiful as they. But it had outlived its age, and we knew we could replace it by a better—so its destruction was inevitable; and if we had made the same progress in the higher that we have in the lower branches of the building art, we should see a Gothic cathedral pulled down with the same indifference, content to know that we could easily replace it by one far nobler and more worthy of our age and intelligence. No architect during the Middle Ages ever hesitated to pull down any part of a cathedral that was old and going to decay, and to replace it with something in the style of the day, however incongruous that might be; and if we were progressing as they were, we should have as little compunction in following the same course.

In the confusion of ideas and of styles which now prevails, it is satisfactory to be able to contemplate, in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, at least one great building carried out wholly on the principles of Gothic or of any true style of art. No material is used in it which is not the best for its purpose, no constructive expedient employed which was not absolutely essential, and it depends wholly for its effect on the arrangement of its parts and the display of its construction. So essentially is its principle the same which, as we have seen, animated Gothic architecture, that we hardly know even now how much of the