Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/144

Rh purposes, to turn the people out of the ancient market where they keep their stalls under the old palace walls happily enough, summer and winter, like so many Dutch pictures, we build a cage of iron and glass like an enormous cucumber frame, inexpressibly hideous, and equally incommodious, and only adapted to grill the people in June and turn them to ice in January. What is the reason? We have liberal givers such as your countryman Sloane, such as my countryman Galliera, yet what single modern thing worth producing can we show? We have destroyed much that will be as irreparable a loss to future generations as the art destroyed in the great siege is to us. But we have produced nothing save deformity. Perhaps, indeed, we might not have any second Michael Angelo to answer if we called on him; but it is certain that we must have architects capable of devising something in carven stone to edge a bridge; we must have artists who, were they consulted, would say, 'do not insult a sublime panorama of the most poetic and celebrated valley in the world by putting into the foreground a square guards' box, a stucco