done once for all. It is wise to do that
which you can do better than it has ever been
done before. It is not wise, in a great and
advanced era, to do that imperfectly which, at
a period now gloriously surpassed, was done
better than, with all our mechanical aids, it can
be done now; because it was then the natural
expression of the feeling of the time. This is an
age of glass and iron, why is there no church
constructed of those materials? We should have
no stone roof then to shut the sky out, as our
creed requires no shelter from the light of Truth.

It may be urged, you would hear ill in this
same glass cathedral, and indeed you would.
What do you want to hear? The hearing was
wanted at the time when there were no printing
presses and no books. The voices of a thousand
singers would be heard, and of ten times that
number of men at prayer. To worship, to
pray, to sing hymns of praise is what we want
churches for in this age, and not to listen to a
single voice. The time has moved in all things
else, why has it stood so strangely still in this?

There needs no revision, which we are so
afraid of, but simply a division of our Church
services, to furnish the Liturgy for such a
cathedral as this in question, nor, for those who
like it, need the sermon or lecture be an impossible
thing. Some smaller part of the building,
some side chapel, might be set apart for such a
purpose.

Were such an edifice as this, A CRYSTAL
CATHEDRAL, to be raised on Primrose-hill, with
short and attractive services carried on there
throughout the Sunday, many men would go to
church who never do so now; because, after a
week of labour and effort, a compulsory two
hours in a pew is a restraint to which they are
slow to yield themselves. It is for such persons
that the writer is pleading, and it is a large
class. There is ample church provision for those
who are satisfied with things as they are; but
there is another class, whose requirements have
surely been too little studied, and in whose interests
these words are written.

The period next arrived at in our London
Buildings is, perhaps, rather an ostentatious
one. Not ostentatious about nothing, but
still making the most of itself. The edifices
are not only fine, but they tell you that they
are so. In Whitehall, where may be seen the
dawning of this grandiose and pompous style;
in St. Paul's Cathedral, where its full development
is attained; and, for a minor example, in
Somerset House — in all these, a certain element
of ostentation may be detected, which, because
there is something real and sterling behind it, is
neither despicable nor offensive. St. James's
Palace does not belong to that period in appearance,
and all its suggestions are of an earlier
time; but no one who looks at Whitehall can
associate that noble building with any race but
the Stuarts, and with the period when every trace
of medievalism was gone for ever; a time which
it is difficult, by-the-by, to mark more accurately
and more characteristically than by the substitution
of the title "Mister" for the older and
more gracious "Master." This is an infinitely
subtle though trifling sign of those times, and
has in it the dawning of this age in which we
live, and of its habits and customs. "Where is
Mr. Pym?" was the plaintive inquiry of Charles
the First when in search of his "birds that were
flown" from the House of Commons.

From that unhappy second king of the Stuart
race, it is difficult to get away. The real figure
of Charles the First at Charing-cross held us
longest while we were considering the statues,
and now an imaginary figure of that sinned
against and sinning sovereign, appears at the
Whitehall window.

Though, there are in Whitehall—a faultless
model of its kind—a thousand beauties to
admire. Its proportions would be hurt by six
inches more or less in any part, so exquisite
is their symmetry and so just their balance. It
is the exact size that an unbroken building
should be; had it been larger it would have
been monotonous: smaller, it had been
unimposing. Let no one suppose that such a
structure is easy to raise, because it is so
simple. The easy-looking, and the simple
things in all art matters are more difficult
than the complex and intricate. It is a rule
that easy reading is hard writing, and to
construct anything that the mind takes in without
effort, and without being puzzled by it, is a
triumph of art. It might be deemed no arduous
task to raise such a palace as Whitehall with its
four plain walls with windows in it. If it were
easy to build so, why is it not done? The Reform
Club in Pall-mall has four plain walls with
windows in it, as Whitehall has, but he who
goes from one to the other will find a difference
which is not in favour of the club-house. There
is one strange deficiency in Whitehall which
must strike every one who looks at it, and that
is the absence of any apparent means of getting
into it. At first sight it appears to be all windows
and no doors, and you really become quite
puzzled at last as to this omission, and, examining
the building behind and before in vain, discover
at last, in a great ugly block of masonry,
built on at the side, a couple of little doors,
such as are seen in the vestry of a church, and
which give admission to the interior of the Hall.
These means of entrance are both paltry and
unworthy, and if the men who sit on horseback in
the alcoves of the Horse Guards opposite are
ever critically disposed, here is the weak point
for them to fasten upon. The fact is, that
Whitehall is a fragment, and was simply a
banqueting-hall built on to the original palace in
the time of James the First.

And what if it is to the order of ostentation
that St. Paul's belongs? If it is ostentatious,
has it not cause to be so? Could that vacant
place have been better filled, could that hill of
Ludgate have been better crowned, than by the
work of Wren which is there? In the Gothic
rage which has fevered us of late, the beauty of
this cathedral has been too much lost sight of;
for it must be remembered that, independently