contrast between old and new is strikingly presented, by way of object lessons, in a series of plates, arranged side by side, and devised with a great deal of satirical humour.  There is, e.g., a Catholic town in 1440, rich with its ancient stone bridge, its battlemented wall and city gate, and the spires and towers of St. Marie’s Abbey, the Guild Hall, Queen’s Cross, St. Cuthbert’s Church, and the half-timbered, steep-roofed, gabled houses of the burgesses.  Over against it is the picture of the same town in 1840, hideous with the New Jail, Gas Works, Lunatic Asylum, Wesleyan Chapel, New Town Hall, Iron Works, Quaker Meeting-house, Socialist Hall of Science, and other abominations of a prosperous modern industrial community.  Or there is the beautiful old western doorway of St. Mary Overies, destroyed in 1838.  The door stands invitingly open, showing the noble interior with kneeling worshippers scattered here and there over the unobstructed pavement.  Opposite is the new door, grimly closed, with a printed notice nailed upon it:  “Divine Service on Sundays.  Evening lecture.”  A separate plate exhibits a single compartment of the old door curiously carved in oak; and beside it a compartment of the new door in painted deal and plain as a pike-staff.

But the author is forced to confess that the case is not much better in Catholic countries, where stained windows have been displaced by white panes, frescoed ceilings covered with a yellow wash, and the “bastard pagan style” introduced among the venerable sanctities of old religion.  English travellers return from the Continent disgusted with the tinsel ornament and theatrical trumperies that they have seen in foreign churches.  “I do not think,” he concludes, “the architecture of our English churches would have fared much better under a Catholic hierarchy. . . .  It is a most melancholy truth that there does not exist much sympathy of idea between a great portion of the present Catholic body in England and their glorious ancestors. . . .  Indeed, such is the total absence of solemnity in a great portion of modern Catholic buildings in England, that I do not hesitate to say that a few crumbling walls and prostrate arches of a religious edifice raised during the days of faith will convey a far stronger religious impression to the mind than the actual service of half the chapels in England.”

In short, Pugin’s Catholicism, though doubtless sincere, was prompted by his professional feelings.  His reverence was given to the mediaeval Church, not to her—­aesthetically—­degenerate daughter; and it extended to the whole system of life and thought peculiar to the Middle Ages.  “Men must learn,” he wrote, “that the period hitherto called dark and ignorant far excelled our age in wisdom, that art ceased when it is said to have been revived, that superstition was piety, and bigotry faith.”  In many of his views Pugin anticipates Ruskin.  He did not like St. Peter’s at Rome, and said:  “If those students who