A day never passes without our hearing our English architects called
upon to be original, and to invent a new style: about as sensible and
necessary an exhortation as to ask of a man who has never had rags
enough on his back to keep out cold, to invent a new mode of cutting a
coat. Give him a whole coat first, and let him concern himself about
the fashion of it afterwards. We want no new style of architecture. Who
wants a new style of painting or sculpture? But we want some style. It
is of marvellously little importance, if we have a code of laws and
they be good laws, whether they be new or old, foreign or native, Roman
or Saxon, or Norman, or English laws. But it is of considerable
importance that we should have a code of laws of one kind or another,
and that code accepted and enforced from one side of the island to
another, and not one law made ground of judgment at York and another in
Exeter. And in like manner it does not matter one marble splinter
whether we have an old or new architecture, but it matters everything
whether we have an architecture truly so called or not; that is,
whether an architecture whose laws might be taught at our schools from
Cornwall to Northumberland, as we teach English spelling and English
grammar, or an architecture which is to be invented fresh every time we
build a workhouse or a parish school.
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