Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/700

ÆT. 58] this proposal not only to continue and extend that degrading usage, but to mutilate the Abbey still further under such a pretext by remodelling or enlargement, was one the mere mention of which roused him into fury. As regards the church itself, each fresh piece of restoration was in his deliberate judgment more scandalous and more ruinous than its predecessors. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had indeed suffered heavily, but its worst sufferings had been reserved for modern times. "Being situated in the centre of government," he bitterly writes, "it has not enjoyed the advantages of boorish neglect, which have left so much of interest in remoter parts of the country." On the work of Wren and his successors down to Wyatt, the architects of "the ignorance," to use that Arabian phrase which Morris was so fond of quoting, he touches with a light scorn, gibbeting their work as "the Bible and Prayer-book style of the period," "the queer style of driven-into-a-corner Classic." With Wyatt and the first period of Gothic knowledge, whose architects were far more destructive than those of the Gothic ignorance, worse changes began. Wyatt "managed to take all the romance out of the exterior of the most romantic work of the late Middle Ages," Henry VII.'s Chapel. Blore, followed by Gilbert Scott, "completely destroyed all trace of the handwork of the mediæval masons" in the north aisle. Scott, when he was made architect of the Abbey and the second period of Gothic knowledge had arrived, "carefully restored the Chapter House, that is, he made it a modern building." Finally Mr. Pearson, "driven by the necessity of making some structural repairs," carried out the idea of making a conjectural restoration of the north transept. The façade of the eighteenth century, a time when archi-