With Pugin’s “Contrasts” began the “Battle of the Styles.”  This was soon decided in Pugin’s favour, so far as ecclesiastical buildings were concerned.  Fergusson, who is hostile to Gothic, admits that wherever clerical influence extended, the style came into fashion.  The Cambridge Camden Society was founded in 1839 for the study of church architecture and ritual, and issued the first number of its magazine, The Ecclesiologist, in 1841.  But the first national triumph for secular Gothic was won when Barry’s design for the new houses of Parliament was selected from among ninety-seven competing plans.  The corner-stone was laid at Westminster in 1840, and much of the detail, as the work went on, was furnished by Pugin.

It was not long before the Gothic revival found an ally in the same great writer who had already come forward as the champion of Pre-Raphaelite painting.  The masterly analysis of “The Nature of Gothic” in “The Stones of Venice” (vol. i., 1851; vols. ii. and iii., 1853), and the eloquence and beauty of a hundred passages throughout the three volumes, fascinated a public which cared little about art, but knew good literature when they saw it.  Eastlake testifies that Ruskin had some practical influence on English building.  Young artists went to Venice to study the remains of Italian Gothic, and the results of their studies were seen in the surface treatment of many London facades, especially in the cusped window arches, and in the stripes of coloured bricks which give a zebra-like appearance to the architecture of the period.  But, in general, working architects were rather contemptuous of Ruskin’s fine-spun theories, which they ridiculed as fantastic, self-contradictory, and super-subtle; rhetoric or metaphysics, in short, and not helpful art criticism.

Ruskin’s adhesion to Gothic was without compromise.  It was “not only the best, but the only rational architecture.”  “I plead for the introduction of the Gothic form into our domestic architecture, not merely because it is lovely, but because it is the only form of faithful, strong, enduring, and honourable building, in such materials as come daily to our hands.” [28] On the other hand, Roman architecture is essentially base; the study of classical literature is “pestilent”; and most modern building is the fruit of “the Renaissance poison tree.”  “If . . . any of my readers should determine . . . to set themselves to the revival of a healthy school of architecture in England, and wish to know in few words how this may be done, the answer is clear and simple.  First, let us cast out utterly whatever is connected with the Greek, Roman, or Renaissance architecture, in principle or in form. . . .  The whole mass of the architecture, founded on Greek and Roman models, which we have been in the habit of building for the last three centuries, is utterly devoid of all life, virtue, honourableness, or power of doing good.  It is base, unnatural, unfruitful, unenjoyable, and impious.  Pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age.” [29]