provision, save in the case of boy scouts and troglodytes, is the business of the architect. Architecture, therefore, by reason of its twofold nature, half art, half science, is peculiarly dependent on the tastes and demands of the layman, and whereas in the other arts a neglected genius working in his garret may just conceivably produce a masterpiece, no architect has ever produced anything of lasting significance in the absence of a receptive public.

Today architecture is an activity about which the average man cares little and knows less, and such views as he may hold are founded not on any personal bias, which might be regrettable but would certainly be excusable, but on a variety of acquired misconceptions. This was not always the case; in the eighteenth century every well-educated man considered himself entitled to express his opinion about the moulding of a cornice or the disposition of a pilaster, and in nine cases out of ten was possessed of sufficient knowledge to lend it weight. But early in the nineteenth century this happy state of affairs came to an end and architecture was removed from the sphere of everyday life and placed under the jealous guardianship of experts and æsthetes. Faith became a substitute for knowledge and very soon the ordinary person came to consider architecture in the same light as higher mathematics or Hegelian philosophy; as something which he could never hope properly to understand and possessed of a scale of values that he must take on trust. With the advent of Mr Ruskin, whose distinction it was to express in prose of incomparable grandeur thought of an unparalleled confusion, this divorce from reality became complete, and in less than no time the whole theory of architecture had become hopelessly confounded with morals, religion and a great many other things with which it had not the least connection; while its practice went rapidly to pot.

However, while Mr Ruskin and his fellows were only too happy to relieve the man in the street from any further necessity to use his own judgment in the matter of architecture, they nevertheless succeeded in implanting all too firmly in his mind – not, it must be admitted, altogether intentionally – a lasting impression that what was old was automatically good, and the older, within the limits of the Christian era, the better. That Mr Ruskin in his championship of the Middle Ages could not possibly foresee the lengths to which this doctrine xii