We may as well apprise the reader at once, that these are not seven great architects, nor seven great buildings; but the seven principles or feelings of Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, and Obedience, which Mr. Ruskin considers the presiding influences of good architecture. The classification appears somewhat arbitrary, and the nomenclature sufficiently fantastic. We would rather, ourselves, that Mr. Ruskin had neither adopted a mystical number nor a figurative terminology. We would not feel much confidence in the invitation of the artist who should entitle his essay the Seven Pencils of Painting, or of the musician who set forth the principles of his art as the Seven Plec tra (we willingly avoid the English equivalent) of Harmony. Neither does it in the least commend Mr. Ruskin's Heptalampadon, that it presents itself to us in a mysterious binding of mediæval knots, symbolic monsters, and black-letter epigraphs. A note informs us that these mystical decorations are from the floor of San Miniato at Florence. In San Miniato, we dare say, they are suitable and significant; but, stamped on the cover of a modern essay, they do not afford much inducement to penetrate beneath forms so barbaresque in search of useful infor. mation or elegant learning. With his title and externals, however, our quarrel with Mr. Ruskin in a great measure ceases. We remember the persuasive force and picturesque vigour of argu. ment which brought home his plea for the modern painters with so much cogency to the reason, through processes affording so much delight to the imagi.

nation; and, recognising in the author of that book a writer of note and consideration, we open this essay of his on architecture, with the respect due to an original thinker and an elegant expositor of new opinion.

Of man's works on the globe which he inhabits, the greatest beyond measure are those effected by the husbandman. If all the structural works of mankind were brought together in one place, they would not make, on any broad prospect of the earth, so considerable a show as the altered surface of one well-tilled province. But after the husbandman, the builder is the greatest of workmen. If he build well, he builds for both profit and delight; for uses intellectual and moral, as well as for the purposes of practical utility. Every excellence in his art associates itself with feeling and sentiment. Whether he raise the towers or bastions of the fortress, or the spires and pinnacles of the temple set apart for the worship of God, he deals in forms and proportions, combinations, and symmetries which, with every pur pose they subserve, speak a poetic language of their own, intelligible, impressive, and almost as lasting as the divine utterances of the poet himself, dealing in the unencumbered expressions of speech. How to build so as to attain this utterance is a more difficult inquiry than how to compose an epic or a tragedy. For the poem is a work wholly intellectual; but the building must first be useful, and is only collaterally capable of this sort of expression. Hence the rarity of essays on architectural, as compared with those on literary, taste. Of late, in

By John Ruskin, Author of "Modern 1849.

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deed, the peculiar theological tendencies of England have called forth some discussions and inquiries touching the capacity of particular architectural styles for the expression of religious sentiment; but none of these have aimed at any comprehensive analysis of their subject; nor do we suppose any of their authors will dispute with Mr. Ruskin the claim to be considered our first philosopher of the arts and chief critic of architectural expression.

The philosophic pretensions of the essay are, as we have said, marred by the fantastic phraseology of the title, and by the arbitrary reduction to a mystical number of the rules and principles expounded in the text. Defects of style also contribute to make the work less acceptable than it ought, for its proper merit's sake, to be, among readers of settled judgment. There are here, as in the "Modern Painters," many flamboyant and even a few rococo passages, where outline is lost in tracery, and projection confounded by obtrusive imagery. But if we had not the excesses, we might want the vigour of genius; and there are very few of these verbal excrescences which we would not be satisfied to retain rather than lose the meaning which they overlay.

It almost shocks us to think that we should use words so harsh as some of these may appear, towards a writer whose pages we cannot open without delight. Every subject is handled with such a charming novelty; with so much feeling, and such graceful vivacity; we encounter at every turn opinions so judicious, and yet so original; and are sensible that we are dealing with a mind of such perfect candour and integrity, that it requires an effort to preserve our own equipoise, and prevent our being carried away by the strong current of Mr. Ruskin's enthusiasm for mediæval art.

For, although our author professes to expound only those principles which might be exemplified in any settled style, it is entirely from mediæval works he draws his illustrations. He is here plainly more at home than in the Augustan or the Grecian school. His love of the delicate, the picturesque, and the mysterious, here gratifies itself in congenial forms of fretwork, of irregular arcades, and half-discovered vistas. The solemn roof, suspended from its unseen external

props, fills him with a pleasing awe; the inlaid patterns and variegated courses and diamonds of differentcoloured masonry, delight his sense of colour and the venerable air of the ; twelfth century inspires him with a dreamy sentiment of Anglican Catholicity, and of Anglican progress in religion and virtue, most humane and amiable, and blamelessly patriotic. For our part, we discard sentiments and associations of the mediæval kind. We desire light and distinctness. We wish to see the roof over our head supported by walls or pillars evidently adequate to the burthen. We admire stateliness, regularity, and spaciousness. We wish to breathe the free air of the stoa; and amid gardens and fountains, and broad balustraded terraces, to ponder the lessons of Greek and Roman wisdom. We prefer the garden front of Carton to the façade of Eaton Hall; and consider Trinity College, Dublin, a much nobler palace than any of the Colleges of Cambridge. With these differences of taste and mental habit, we must endeavour to do justice to Mr. Ruskin's exposition of the excellencies of mediæval architecture, with as little leaning towards our own prepossessions as strong opinion will allow.

Opinion is strong on both sides. "I," says Mr. Ruskin, in his preface, "must be prepared to bear the charge of impertinence which can hardly but attach to the writer who assumes a dogmatical tone in speaking of an art he has never practised. There are, however, cases in which men feel too keenly to be silent, and, perhaps, too strongly to be wrong: I have been forced into this impertinence, and have suffered too much from the destruction or neglect of the architecture I have loved, and from the erection of that which I cannot love, to reason cautiously respecting the modesty of my opposition to the principles which have induced the scorn of the one, or directed the design of the other. And I have been the less careful to modify the confidence of my statements of principles, because, in the midst of the opposition and uncertainty of our architectural systems, it seems to me that there is something grateful in any positive opinion, though in many points wrong, as even weeds are useful that grow on a bank of sand." Some allowance may therefore be made for a