A day never passes without our hearing our English architects called upon to be original, and to invent a new style:  about as sensible and necessary an exhortation as to ask of a man who has never had rags enough on his back to keep out cold, to invent a new mode of cutting a coat.  Give him a whole coat first, and let him concern himself about the fashion of it afterwards.  We want no new style of architecture.  Who wants a new style of painting or sculpture?  But we want some style.  It is of marvellously little importance, if we have a code of laws and they be good laws, whether they be new or old, foreign or native, Roman or Saxon, or Norman, or English laws.  But it is of considerable importance that we should have a code of laws of one kind or another, and that code accepted and enforced from one side of the island to another, and not one law made ground of judgment at York and another in Exeter.  And in like manner it does not matter one marble splinter whether we have an old or new architecture, but it matters everything whether we have an architecture truly so called or not; that is, whether an architecture whose laws might be taught at our schools from Cornwall to Northumberland, as we teach English spelling and English grammar, or an architecture which is to be invented fresh every time we build a workhouse or a parish school.  There seems to me to be a wonderful misunderstanding among the majority of architects at the present day as to the very nature and meaning of Originality, and of all wherein it consists.  Originality in expression does not depend on invention of new words; nor originality in poetry on invention of new measures; nor, in painting, on invention of new colours, or new modes of using them.  The chords of music, the harmonies of colour, the general principles of the arrangement of sculptural masses, have been determined long ago, and, in all probability, cannot be added to any more than they can be altered.  Granting that they may be, such additions or alterations are much more the work of time and of multitudes than of individual inventors.  We may have one Van Eyck,[170] who will be known as the introducer of a new style once in ten centuries, but he himself will trace his invention to some accidental by-play or pursuit; and the use of that invention will depend altogether on the popular necessities or instincts of the period.  Originality depends on nothing of the kind.  A man who has the gift, will take up any style that is going, the style of his day, and will work in that, and be great in that, and make everything that he does in it look as fresh as if every thought of it had just come down from heaven.  I do not say that he will not take liberties with his materials, or with his rules:  I do not say that strange changes will not sometimes be wrought by his efforts, or his fancies, in both.  But those changes will be instructive, natural, facile, though sometimes marvellous; they will never be sought after as things