that of Professor Pillans, who asserts that, "where young people are taught as they ought to be they are quite as happy in school as at play, seldom less delighted, nay, often more, with the well-directed exercise of their mental energies, than with that of their muscular powers" As suggesting a final reason for making education a process of self-instruction, and by consequence a process of pleasurable instruction, we may advert to the fact that, in proportion as it is made so, is there a probability that education will not cease when schooldays end. As long as the acquisition of knowledge is rendered habitually repugnant, so long will there be a prevailing tendency to discontinue it when free from the coercion of parents and masters. And when the acquisition of knowledge has been rendered habitually gratifying, then will there be as prevailing a tendency to continue, without superintendence, that same self-culture previously carried on under superintendence. These results are inevitable. Whilst the laws of mental association remain true, whilst men dislike the things and places that suggest painful recollections, and delight in those which call to mind bygone pleasures,-painful lessons will make knowledge repulsive, and pleasurable lessons will make it attractive. The men to whom in boyhood information came in dreary tasks along with threats of punishment, and who were never led into habits of independent inquiry, are unlikely to be students in after years; whilst those to whom it came in the natural forms, at the proper times, and who remember its facts as not only interesting in themselves, but as the occasions of a long series of gratifying successes, are likely to continue through life that self-instruction commenced in youth. ART. VI.-1. The Stones of Venice. Vol. II. The Sea Stories. By JOHN RUSKIN. London, 1853. 2. The Stones of Venice. Vol. III. The Fall. By JoHN RUSKIN. London, 1853. OUR Railway Stations are, for the most part, curious and not uninstructive spectacles. They constitute the one field which has been opened, of late years, for the display of some originality of architectural and decorative resource. Our new streets, club-houses, palaces, and bridges, are naturally not unlike other edifices of the same kind which have preceded them; but in Railway Stations there arose a new necessity, and we had a right to expect from them a new result. The expectation has been only partially disappointed. All Railway travellers who trouble themselves with "trifles" of this kind will agree with us when we declare, that, as a general rule, whenever artistic effect has been attempted in the places in question, the result has been a display of almost hopeless imbecility; but, on the other hand, where no such effect has been sought, it has often been obtained. The subject is hardly one that would have called for attention, had it not been for the vast sums which have been, and are still being, expended to no purpose in the world, but that of declaring to the world our national incapacity for doing anything but make ourselves ridiculous when we attempt to be artistical. We can be artistical if we do not try too hard, as the Crystal Palace, London Bridge, the unfurnished and unnoticed Record Office near Fetter Lane, and some few other recent works may prove; but as soon as we set our minds seriously upon some development of the "sublime and beautiful," we become Dogberrys upon a disastrous scale, and insist upon proclaiming our inefficiency, in durable brick and mortar, stone, or oak, or iron, or at very least in lath and plaster. "Variety is charming," is a very good maxim when properly applied, but a very bad one otherwise; and this maxim falsely applied, is the only principle of art of which our Railway architects seem to have been cognizant. A solemn Greek portico, raised, perhaps, at an expense which would have paid for the Bishop of Manchester's cathedral, introduces us to a long iron shed, under which engines are for ever hissing and whistling, luggage trucks for ever rumbling, and innumerable sights and sounds for ever going on, all of a character decidedly unclassic. We are presently whirled off, and by way, perhaps, of a poetical and hyperbolical allusion to the speed of travelling, we find ourselves far away from Greece, despatching a cup of coffee under a modest Gothic porch. When we have arrived at our journey's end we have been transported through the places and times of Chinese, Ninevite, Cinque-cento, Tudor, and Moresque art, and, unless we have much more wit than our betters, the architects, we have also arrived at the conclusion that art in general, and architecture in particular, is rank humbug, and the less we know of it the better. The furniture of the Railway Stations is, of course, in keeping with the architecture; that is to say, it is out of keeping with itself, and with everything else. And, be it remarked, no cost is spared to make all this absurdity as glaring as possible. For one example out of a thousand, take the refreshment rooms at the Tunbridge Station; two meanly proportioned apartments, with shabby counters, floor-cloth, and wretched French papering, all in the most disapproved modern taste, and, by way of startling relief, two mirrors and two side tables in oak, the carving of which, though vile in quality, is enough in elaboration, costliness, and quantity to furnish forth a suite of rooms in an antique palace! Really such sights are too humiliating for laughter. One's stomach revolts against jam puffs and ginger beer which have decorative concomitants like these. Railway directors, and rising young architects, and contracting upholsterers, may very likely open their innocent eyes at such denunciations, and ask what we would have them to do. Do nothing but your business is the answer; give us safe lines, punctual times; roofs of zinc, iron, wood, or what you will, so they be competent to keep out the rain and let in the light; leave "style" to take care of itself, as it always will, if you trust it; make your furniture strong and unpretending, as befits rough and hasty usage; do with your "artistic effects" of all kinds, what the song recommends little " Bo-peep" to do with her sheep; "leave them alone, and they'll come home," and bring their decorative appendages behind them. Whenever mechanical operations are carried on upon a large scale, as in the Railway, there is sure to be enough to amuse and delight the eye. What can be more pleasing, in its place, than the light iron roof, with its simple, yet intricate supports of spandrels, rods, and circles, at Euston Square; or the vast transparent vault and appropriate masses of brickwork at King's Cross? What "fine art" that we could have time to understand on a Railway journey could equal the beauty of the throbbing engines, or the admirably calculated reticulation and intersection of the iron lines at some great junction? It is with these objects, and the like, that passengers will amuse themselves if they have a disengaged moment on their way, and not with miserable imitations of defunct and inappropriate architectures, or insane oak carving. The architecture of the British metropolis, with its three or four suburban Florences, all raised within the last twenty years, if less extravagantly absurd than that of the comparatively unimportant department above noticed, is not less hopelessly imbecile. Several great new streets are in the process of formation, and several others are talked about, and it greatly concerns the public generally, that, if possible, these new streets should be utterly unlike any of the two or three hundred miles of street which have been added to the metropolis since some dæmon wispered, 'London have a a taste'" in street architecture—that is to say, since about the commencement of the second quarter of this century, before which time men had long exhibited a humble and wholesome sense of their present inability to do more than adhere, in their domestic architecture, to the simple type of the baked mud-hut, namely, four bare brick walls, in their magnitudė, and in the number of their apertures, proportioned to the tenant's wealth or necessities. The mud-hut style is that of the whole heart of the metropolis, with the exception of some few groups of houses which have survived to remind us that our great-great-grandfa hers were not quite the ignoramuses in housebuilding which their undutiful great-greatgrandchildren, among other libellous suppositions, would willingly think then to have been. The mud-hut style is unquestionably a melancholy one; for it is the architectural expression of the melancholy truth that the builders were incapable of doing anything better. But it is, we repeat, the expression of a truth, although a sad one, and, as such, this style has a decided claim to our respect. Not so with the insane "flare-up" in domestic architecture which took place a few years ago, beginning with the magnificences of Regent Street and the Regent's Park, and, alas! we fear, not ending with Mr. Moses's clothes' shops and New Oxford Street, that reductio ad superbum of the architectural problem. For want of a better name we must call this the slop-shop style, a title quite justified by its associations, though not pleasing perhaps to the ears polite of the professional architects who have brought into existence this new thing under the sun. We cannot admit that this style is in any way respectable, or comparable to the pure and mud-hut style, which we earnestly recommend our modern "Iniquity Jones's" of street edification, to do their best to study and restore without further delay, unless they find it in them to give their architectural repentance a still nobler direction, by considering and re-producing the works of those who lived in the ancient times, before the birth of the mud-hut style. We are quite aware of the difficulty of all kinds of repentance, and artistical repentance, we know, is of all kinds the most difficult. Indeed, it is a business so rarely undertaken in sincerity that we can call to mind, in the whole history of art, but one unquestionable example of it. This, however, is an example which gives us good hope of the possibility, and even probability of the particular instance of repentance which we are now recommending. Our church architects have really reformed; they have really cast behind them the pagan abominations which, for two cen room, bearing in her arms an enormous hollow bracket in lath and plaster, which, weary of even seeming to support the palladian cornice, had just fallen down. Please, ma'am, all the finery's coming off!' was the woman's naïve expression of regret. Now I think that under the present system of building for 99 years, the most that Mr. Ruskin, or any one else, can expect of housebuilders, is that their lath and plaster brackets, volutes, pendants, and other 'finery,' should stick on until the house fall in with the land lease. To ask them to carve the same in stone, or to task their wits to discover new modes of architectural loveliness, appears to me to be an injustice and a patent absurdity.” It must however, be confessed, that the whole weight of the responsibility of the evil we have been complaining of, does not rest with the house-builders. The conditions under which they are obliged to build are almost enough to have made them what they are, and we are rather surprised that Mr. Ruskin should not have placed greater em- Another great aid and abettor of bad archiphasis than he has, on certainly the most fer-tecture, and of bad art generally, is the wontile source of the meanness of urban domestic derful and most discouraging indifference of architecture. The following passage is part of the people. This indifference is, no doubt, a letter, signed C. K. P., recently, printed in in great part owing to their habitual life the "Times" newspaper. We entirely agree among buildings not worth looking at, but with it:there have lately been a few remarkable exceptions to the usual architectural nullity, and these ought to have attracted more attention than they have. The chief of these exceptions is the Legislative Palace at Westminster. "There has lately been a great deal of plausible talking and writing about the wretched taste displayed in modern house-architecture, but it seems to me that the taste of the people and the architects in this matter has been needlessly vilified. The fact is, that taste' has had little or nothing to do with the business. We have been doing the domestic architecture' of our own day too much honour in seeking so far for the cause of its nullity. Mr. Ruskin (Stones of Venice, vol. iii. page 2) sets before our imaginations an ancient thoroughfare of Rouen or Nuremberg, and bids us bethink ourselves of Harley Street, or Gower Street, and weep over what the renaissance school has gradually brought us to. But the renaissance school has been guiltless in this matter, whatever else it may be chargeable with. Harley Street and Gower Street, with a hundred miles of other streets just like them, have written on their fronts their fatal sentence-to fall in 99 years after the time of edification. Surely that is enough to frighten all architectural expression out of the face of a house, without help from the renaissance. "It was very well for the old gables of Nuremberg to put on countenances of beauty and fun, wooden and recklessly hung in the air, as most of them were, they had centuries to look forward to, and a day's labour more or less laid out on the grin of a corbel head, and the wave of a moulding was not to be grudged when the investment was for the lifetime of a nation and not of a man. When we consider for what time our London houses are meant to exist, I think we should wonder that their architects are so lighthearted and jocose as they sometimes seem to be. Look at the broad suburban cincture of cottages of gentility,' in white compo. Here, indeed, the renaissance is in its glory; but far from declaiming against it, we ought thankfully to accept the recognition, such as it is, of humanity's repugnance to the bare sublimity of square brick walls with holes in them. I happened to be in one of the handsomest of the new houses in St. John's Wood the other day, when the housekeeper entered the The money which has been, and is to be spent, upon the New Houses of Parliament, is of an amount sufficient alone to awaken a sensible interest in the mind of all taxable persons, as to the result which has been obtained by so serious a call upon their purses. In a matter of a few tens of thousands, we can afford to "suppose that it is all right," although we may not be quite able to understand, at a glance, whether or not, the article given in exchange is worth as many pence. Even when, as in Buckingham Palace, and the New Royal Exchange, the cost amounts to a very considerable fraction of a million, the sum, if spread over the nation, would not be very alarming, and if the Queen is satisfied with her house, and the merchants are content to meet among the mystic symbols of the Renaissance" Architecture, it is no great matter to the bulk of the people, who feel quite as little interested as Her Majesty or the merchants can be, in the artistical merits or demerits of the Exchange and the Palace. But when the money spent counts by millions, it is a different matter. Were Her Majesty and all the Lords and Commons in Parlia ment assembled to declare their complete satisfaction in the result of Mr. Barry's labours, we could scarcely afford to let the matter rest there. Parliamentary majorities may be tolerably safe upon most social questions, but in any large company of ordinary men, the truth upon a question of taste in art, would almost certainly be the mind of the minority. 66 In the case of such a work as the New Palace at Westminister, the people are bound to take a great deal more interest than they do, and the particular instance in point would certainly repay them for taking a little trouble to think, and through thinking, to feel about the matter; for, with all its faults, this building is a most splendid work, and if it had but the good fortune to be a middle-age ruin, instead of a bran new nineteenth century production, it would be scarcely second in fame to the Cathedral of Cologne itself-less certainly from the rivalry of its merit, than by reason of its unparalleled magnificence, both in size and richness of detail, and on account of certain effects which are almost inseparable from Gothic architecture on a great scale. We are going to astonish the professional architects by our presumption; it consists in offering them a piece of advice, which carried out, would, we are confident, very materially add to the already superb effect of the Houses of Parliament, by removing faults so glaring that it is difficult to conceive how they come to be committed by the designers of other parts of the building. whole circle of medieval art, to justify the kind of basement upon which the Houses of Parliament are raised. The plainest village church, or town-hall, had it been built by the mediæval architects in a situation like that of these Houses, would certainly have been raised upon a basement, but the basement character would have been carefully concealed, by various expedients of buttresses, panelling, arcades, &c. It is no answer to our proposition, to say that when the tide is very high, these arcades, &c., would be nearly hidden. It is far better that the river-front should look handsome, if it were only for half its time, than that it should never look so; but the fact is, that well-managed arcades, if only the arched heads of them were out of the water, would suggest the submerged portions to the imagination; and the effect would become even more pleasing at high tide than at low. We would willingly say more upon this nationally important matter, but we have already exhausted the patience of our readers, most of whom must be anxious to know something about the contents of a work, which, although fitted to be one of the most popular ever written, is limited to a small class of readers by its enormously, and we must think, unnecessarily high price. Mr. Ruskin has now been long enough before the public to enable us to make as fair an estimate as can ever ordinarly be made, in such a case, of the nature and amount of the influence of his mind and eloquence upon the world of art in particular, and taste in general. This influence is a phenomenon worth considering. We do not remember anything in the history of art in England, at all corresponding in suddenness and extent to the effect which the works of Mr. Ruskin have already exercised upon the popular taste directly, and through popular taste, on the taste and theo We fancy that most persons would agree. with us, that it would be highly desirable if, happily, it were possible, to remedy the grand defect of the river-front-want of height. What an estimable addition to the effect of this, the grand façade of the building, would be the increase of its height by only ten or fifteen feet! Considering what has already been spent upon this edifice, half a million more might well be devoted to the remedy of this defect. Our readers, particularly the architects, will smile when we assure them that the work is to be done at the cost of less than one fiftieth of that sum. The face of the stone basement that rises from the water, and now carries the building without forming a part of it, has only to be worked into a shallow Gothic panels or arcades, to become incor-ries of artists themselves. It may seem someporated with the building, and to raise it, to what paradoxical to affirm, that the indirect all artistic intents and purposes, by the re- influence has been upon those who are usualquisite number of feet. And not only is this ly supposed to be mediums of the transmission process expedient in order to remedy the de- of new views between their promulgators and fect of altitude, but it is quite necessary in the people. The facts of the case are these. order to preserve the integrity of the Gothic Mr. Ruskin has not done so much by the enuncharacter, which, in an elaborate building ciation of new views, as by the enforcement, like the present, is utterly repugnant to the with magnificent eloquence, of views which neighborhood of any spaces of clear wall. were already parts and parcels of artistical This plain, unpauelled basement, is an unmiti- criticism, but which had as yet found no adgated eye-sore and inconsistency, without re-vocate of sufficient vigour and ability to cause ference to the height of the building it carries. The idea of a separate basement-an essential part of a pagan, or "Renaissance" edifice, is wholly contrary to the character of a Gothic building, which ought to spring from the earth itself as naturally as a tree or a crag. We defy Mr. Barry and his advisers to point out to us a single authority in the The late their full practical recognition in the face of 1854. late Roman and Italian corruptions, for mod- | ern uses; the essential poverty of these styles when compared with medieval Gothic; the dependance of Gothic, and all our architectures, for their excellence, upon truth and reality of construction, and upon development of decoration from the nature and peculiar Thousands of requirements of construction. people had learned to feel, and scores of writers had learned to express their feelings, to readers who possessed technical knowledge, concerning the various loveliness and unmatched excellence of Gothic art. Turner had a large and intelligent school of admirers, long before Mr. Ruskin became its mouthpiece; the Pre-Raphaelites had their little circle of appreciators-ourselves among themwho had nothing but a corroboration of their views in Mr. Ruskin's opportune advocacy of the principles and practice of "these young giants of art." All the doctrines, in fact, by the preaching of which Mr. Ruskin has raised his vast popular name, were well established among a select order of winkers and feelers, before Mr. Ruskin uttered a word in their defence. Indeed, but for the previous admission of those doctrines by the little aristocracy of true taste, even Mr. Ruskin's eloquence would have made but little impression in the first instance. The people never believe any truth the first time they hear it; they insult and tread it under foot when it first confronts them, and tells them that they have been wrong; but in time this despised truth receives a sort of unrecognized recognition in their hearts; they learn to forget and to deny its original promulgators, and to class it with their own instinctive apprehensions; and when a great and eloquent writer, like Mr. Ruskin, utters this truth anew, the people despise it no longer, but worship it,-not in nine cases out of ten, as truth, but as their truth; the truth, at least, which they had learned to think their own; and their applause is not "how new!" but, "we knew that before!" Who has not observed that it is not a new joke which gets laughed at, in an ordinary society, or at the play, but an old one in some new costume. If so innocent and inoffensive a thing as a new joke must knock twice for admission, it is not to be wondered at if new truth, which always calls for the expulsion of some old prejudice, should be received with blank stares of amazement at its impertinence. 66 Even new beauty in poetry. music, painting, 93 whether in art, criticism, or philosophy. Let and if these discoveries are not all together In our opinion-and we have made no light study of architecture and its related artsthe most important piece of criticism as yet produced by Mr. Ruskin, is his account and justification of the church of St. Mark's, Venice, an edifice which, up to the time of the publication of "The Stones of Venice," was a stumblingblock and a mystery to all It violates the laws of all admitted schools persons, architects, or amateurs, who beheld it. of architecture, just as Shakespeares's plays violate all preceding dramatic rules. It is now proved clearly to constitute, as Shakespeare's dramas do, an art by itself, with laws no less severe than those of other schools, but perfectly independent of them; and Mr. in criticism Ruskin's great criticism of this great work of art, not only teaches us to feel that workfor we moderns are too far gone to be able to feel what we cannot in some measure understand-but it reveals to us certain hitherto unknown laws of art which may henceforth be applied, not only to the explication of still anomalous works, but to the development of similar beauty. We are about to give our readers a sketch of Mr. Ruskin's account of the cathedral, but must prepare the way by a few more general glimpses of the strange and wonderful Venetian art as contrasted with our Northern styles, Mr. Ruskin very well reminds us that |