Page:Speeches and addresses by the late Thomas E Ellis M P.pdf/84

 extensively employed in the decoration of private houses, he decorated the Palace of the Viceroy of Egypt, and he was Architect of St. James’s Hall, London. By his example, and especially by his splendid work, "The Grammar of Ornament," he exercised a great influence upon the course and develapment of the Decorative Arts—a movement whose leading spirits to-day are William Morris and Burne-Jones—a movement which is silently and surely revolutionising art and handicraft.

These considerations convince me that it is possible to evoke the latent capacity of the Welsh people in Architecture and Decorative Art as it is roused in Music. And my plea is for the establishment in the University of Wales of a School of Architecture which shall slowly and surely guide the Welsh people. It should be the function of such a school of Architecture to explain and compare the various styles or groups of styles of Architecture, their relation to civilization, their development or decay, and the causes of such growth or wane, It would be its function to teach geometry as the ground-work of