it decidedly exercises a deteriorating influence. In its public capacity it is great and noble; as the new library and ball, in Lincoln's Inn, well prove. But I am speaking of the private abodes of jurisprudence, as they take possession of a new neighbourhood. The houses become dingier; there is a cobwebby appearance about areas and lobbies; and did we not know that our friends within can and do keep their hands cleaner than they do their windows, they would be approached with more of reverential awe, and less of sincere affection than are now their meed.
In time these gaps made in the very heart of the metropolis must be made up; and we cannot afford to restore the same old forms of what Canova is said to have called "long brick walls, with rows of slits in them." There is not a more melancholy exemplification of decayed grandeur than a London street which has once been "respectable," and keeps up, in its desolation, the same unvarying forms as some neighbouring thoroughfare, at whose doors the carriage still lingers. One after another these parts of the city must fall into decay,—for they have been built on calculation of that end,—and it is vain, though painful, to conjecture what will be their next phase.
Thus baffled in our attempts to penetrate the future, let us rest in the present, to seek further light from it and from the past. We are obliged to confess, on comparing these two periods, that there is wanting in our times a quality anciently remarkable, and of great importance to the furtherance of good architecture in the future.
