Long before the close of the Victorian Era our
architects had ceased to be creative. They could not express in their
work the spirit of their time. They could but evolve a medley of old
styles, some foreign, some native, all inappropriate. Take the case of
Mayfair. Mayfair has for some years been in a state of transition. The
old Mayfair, grim and sombre, with its air of selfish privacy and
hauteur and leisure, its plain bricked fa‡ades, so disdainful of show-
-was it not redolent of the century in which it came to being? Its
wide pavements and narrow roads between--could not one see in them the
time when by day gentlemen and ladies went out afoot, needing no
vehicle to whisk them to a destination, and walked to and fro amply,
needing elbow-room for their dignity and their finery, and by night
were borne in chairs, singly? And those queer little places of
worship, those stucco chapels, with their very secular little columns,
their ample pews, and their negligible altars over which one saw the
Lion and the Unicorn fighting, as who should say, for the Cross--did
they not breathe all the inimitable Erastianism of their period? In
qua te qaero proseucha, my Lady Powderbox? Alas! every one of your
tabernacles is dust now--dust turned to mud by the tears of the ghost
of the Rev.
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