246 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

to the mob who destroyed it, any more than it did to us, who walk in sorrow to and fro over its foundation?¹ Neither does any building whatever belong to those mobs who do violence to it. For a mob it is, and must be always; it matters not whether enraged, or in deliberate folly; whether countless, or sitting in committees; the people who destroy anything causelessly are a mob, and Architecture is always destroyed causelessly. A fair building is necessarily worth the ground it stands upon, and will be so until Central Africa and America shall have become as populous as Middlesex: nor is any cause whatever valid as a ground for its destruction. If ever valid, certainly not now, when the place both of the past and future is too much usurped in our minds by the restless and discontented present. The very quietness of nature is gradually withdrawn from us; thousands who once in their necessarily prolonged travel were subjected to an influence, from the silent sky and slumbering fields, more effectual than known or confessed, now bear with them even there the ceaseless fever of their life; and along the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds upon the city gates. The only influence which can in any wise there take the place of that of the woods and fields, is the power of ancient Architecture.² Do not part with it for the sake of the formal square, or of the fenced and planted walk, nor of the goodly street nor opened quay. The pride of a city is not in these. Leave them to the crowd; but

¹ [The old cathedral, one of the noblest in Normandy, was pulled down, to prevent its falling, in 1799. All traces of the church were swept away, except only a broken column, marking the spot where Henry II. of England did penance before the Papal Legates in 1172 for the murder of Becket.]

² [Cf. Stones of Venice, vol. i. ch. xxx. § 6, where this function of Architecture in modern life is further dwelt upon.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]