I have to thank Arthur Edmund Street, Esq., of London, for the generous loan of some notebooks and drawings, and through these for a more intimate knowledge of his great father’s fine temper and manly art. Bryn Mawr, Epiphany , 1915 “ And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof and the walls thereof. And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth. And the building of the wall of it was of jasper; every several gate was of one

I have written the memorial, brief enough and all inadequate, of a man who died more than thirty years ago, who lived a Tory and a High Churchman, who worked to revive Gothic architecture in England. His books are out of print, his occasional papers and pamphlets so entirely dispersed and forgotten that not even a bibliography can be recovered. His name goes unrecognized in general talk; his party is wasted to a wraith or transformed beyond recognition; his Church is menaced by Disestablishment

( From a notebook of 1857 ) August 20, 1857. Left town at 8.30 P.M. by South-Eastern Railway for Folkstone. A close push for it, as I was an unwilling auditor of Lord Riverdale in the House of Lords till 7 P.M. I then had a conference with the Bishop of Oxford. I left them to settle if possible the Divorce question and rushed home just in time to pack and be off. A very quiet passage over to Boulogne was seconded by a weary hour’s waiting at the station before the train started. We reached Paris

( From a notebook of 1855 ) June 13. Somer has lost much of its original interest by the destruction wantonly in 1830 of nearly the whole of the abbey of S. Bertin. It is wicked, but I did not lament this so much as I should have done, had the church been of rather earlier date. From what now remains it appears to have been entirely in one style, and that an early phase of flamboyant—much more like some of our English late middle-pointed than flamboyant, and really very effective in its moulding

A short holiday among French churches has left so many pleasant recollections of new ideas received, new thoughts suggested, ancient memories revived afresh, that it is as impossible as it would be churlish to refuse to communicate some notes of what I have seen; and as they are asked for I proceed to give them, though they must be more slight and generalizing than I could wish; for I have a very profound conviction of the great grandeur of ancient French art, and a corresponding sense of the da

Leaving Paris for Beauvais, the first station at which I stopped was l’Isle Adam, from whence a walk of two or three miles by the banks of the Oise brought me to the fine village church of Champagne. This is very unlike an English village church in its general scheme, but full of interest. In plan it consists of a groined nave and aisles, of six bays, a central tower with a square chancel of one bay, and transepts with apsidal projections from their eastern walls. The date of the whole church (w

From Beauvais I made my way to Compiègne, where I found but little of much interest. The principal church is in size, plan, and general design, decidedly conspicuous; yet it is remarkable how little there is in it to detain an architect beyond the general effect. The bulk of the structure is of good uniform first-pointed character. It consists of a nave and aisle (fifty-three feet in width) of six bays, transepts, and an apsidal choir, the lower part of which has been modernized and has a very b

The two great architectural attractions of Laon are the cathedral and its subordinate buildings, and the fine church of S. Martin. They are situated at the two extremities of the long narrow ridge on which the town is built, which towards the east falls precipitously on three sides almost from the very walls of the cathedral down to the broad vast plain which extends as far as the eye can reach, and from all parts of which the grand mass of the building, with its almost unrivalled cluster of ste

The cathedral of Rheims is most unquestionably a very noble, I might almost say, a perfectly noble, piece of architecture, and nevertheless it seems to fail in producing so great an effect on the mind as many other French churches of smaller dimensions and less architectural pretension. The truth is, that it is a work conceived and executed at two periods and by two (if not more) architects; and though the ground-plan, some portion of the walls, and a little of the sculpture, of the first archit

(From the Transactions of the R. I. B. A. 1889) In the course of last autumn, 28 after having spent three weeks in climbing Swiss mountains, I was able to devote a few days, on my way home, to a district which, as far as I had been able to gather from books, appeared to contain a mine of interest for the architect, not less than for the geologist and the lover of natural scenery. From Lyon I went by Monistrol to Le Puy, which was the grand object of my tour; thence by Brioude into Auvergne, and

( From the papers of the Kent Archæological Society, in Archæologia Cantiana, 1860 ) Having given these preliminary notes, illustrative of the history of the church, it will be well now to give a detailed architectural description of the fabric, illustrated, as far as may be, by the discoveries which have been made in the course of its restoration. 66 The church appears to have consisted at first of a chancel, nave with north and south aisles, western tower with the aisles prolonged on either si

No other alteration was made in the church before the Reformation, and in 1638 the church suffered from the fire caused by lightning, mentioned by Hasted and in the Petitions to Parliament. The roofs throughout must have been burned, and, covered as they were with shingle, 67 it is not surprising that when once set on fire no part of them was saved. Traces of the fire are very evident, particularly on the stones of the tower arches, which are reddened by its action. We found also in the upper pa

In the great Middle Age cities this never could have been the case, for apart from the fact that their churches stood with their doors ever open, while ours are ever jealously kept shut, they were so vast and spacious, and so crowded together, as it seems to us, that there never could have been a real difficulty in finding some home for the feet of the weary, how poor and how miserable soever they might be! And Lübeck still shows this most grandly: you approach by a railway through an uninterest

I reached Naumburg late at night in a tremendous storm; but the sun rose cheeringly, and I started early for the cathedral fearful of disappointment, as I had spent half the previous day in a mistaken attempt to find something interesting at Merseburg,—a place against which it is only right to warn all ecclesiologists. At Naumburg my fate was happier. The first view of the exterior is not very striking. A fair apsidal choir with a tower rising on either side, Romanesque at the base, and finished

At Naumburg there was little, save the cathedral, to detain an ecclesiologist. The Stadt-Kirche deserved little more than a hurried visit, though the singularity of its plan deserves a note. It has an immense apsidal west end, a vast semicircle on the plan, embracing both nave and aisles, and its choir is also terminated with an apse. Beyond this the only remarkable features are the large multifoiled arches which occupy the space between the windows and the plinth in each bay of the eastern apse

In the course of the autumn of last year, I spent a short holiday, not unprofitably, I hope, in the examination of some of the old towns in the north of Germany; and, as the interest of the architectural remains in this district is very great, and our acquaintance with them too slight, I cannot help thinking that a mere transcript of my diary during the time that I was examining them may be of some use and interest. I have already printed notices, drawn up from the same journal, of the churches

Some apology is necessary for venturing to attempt to grapple with so large a subject as is that of pointed architecture in Germany. My only excuse for making such an attempt must be the vivid recollection of the journeys I have at different times made in that country, and the desire to help cordially in explaining to those who have still the journey before them, the features which characterize its architecture. I have unfortunately been unable to hear what Mr. Parker has told you of pointed arc