Do not let us talk then of restoration.  The thing is a Lie from beginning to end.  You may make a model of a building as you may of a corpse, and your model may have the shell of the old walls within it as your cast might have the skeleton, with what advantage I neither see nor care:  but the old building is destroyed, and that more totally and mercilessly than if it had sunk into a heap of dust, or melted into a mass of clay:  more has been gleaned out of desolated Nineveh than ever will be out of re-built Milan.  But, it is said, there may come a necessity for restoration!  Granted.  Look the necessity full in the face, and understand it on its own terms.  It is a necessity for destruction.  Accept it as such, pull the building down, throw its stones into neglected corners, make ballast of them, or mortar, if you will; but do it honestly, and do not set up a Lie in their place.  And look that necessity in the face before it comes, and you may prevent it.  The principle of modern times, (a principle which, I believe, at least in France, to be systematically acted on by the masons, in order to find themselves work, as the abbey of St. Ouen was pulled down by the magistrates of the town by way of giving work to some vagrants,) is to neglect buildings first, and restore them afterwards.  Take proper care of your monuments, and you will not need to restore them.  A few sheets of lead put in time upon the roof, a few dead leaves and sticks swept in time out of a water-course, will save both roof and walls from ruin.  Watch an old building with an anxious care; guard it as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation.  Count its stones as you would jewels of a crown; set watches about it as if at the gates of a besieged city; bind it together with iron where it loosens; stay it with timber where it declines; do not care about the unsightliness of the aid:  better a crutch than a lost limb; and do this tenderly, and reverently, and continually, and many a generation will still be born and pass away beneath its shadow.  Its evil day must come at last; but let it come declaredly and openly, and let no dishonouring and false substitute deprive it of the funeral offices of memory.

Of more wanton or ignorant ravage it is vain to speak; my words will not reach those who commit them, and yet, be it heard or not, I must not leave the truth unstated, that it is again no question of expediency or feeling whether we shall preserve the buildings of past times or not. We have no right whatever to touch them.  They are not ours.  They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us.  The dead have still their right in them:  that which they laboured for, the praise of achievement or the expression of religious feeling, or whatsoever else it might be which in those buildings they intended to be permanent, we have no right to obliterate.  What we have ourselves built, we are at liberty to