Page:Stirling William The Canon 1897.djvu/16

This may account to some extent for the loose style of many English writers, but to examine into that would be quite foreign to my purpose. Certain it is that in the ancient world, words and even letters all had their value apart from what we, now-a-days, call meaning. Thus it is that oriental nations, and especially the Jews and Arabs, attach to their particular alphabets not merely a divine origin (for I suppose our alphabet is just as divine as theirs), but a particular sense of sanctity. No one supposes if a better alphabet than that we now employ were to be found that we should still adhere from superstitious motives to our own. In the ancient world, apart from letters, every ceremony, each rite, and all the arts and sciences had some peculiar canon which was supposed to govern them. If, in his researches, the author has brought to light some canon which may enlighten architects, and so redeem us from the outrages our builders heap upon us, if he can do even a little to stay the hand of Deans and Chapters from destroying buildings which, by the folly of the nation, have been committed to their care (like sheep to wolves), or put stop to the restorer, that arch-fiend, who in consuming thirst for unity tears down a fine Renaissance door-way in a Gothic church, and puts up in its stead what he thinks Gothic, his labour will not have been lost. Could he redeem us from Victorian Queen Anne—but mitigate the horrors of plate-glass, set bounds to all the Gothics, ranging from Strangulated, through the degrees of Congregational and Convulsional down to Ebenezaresque,