Perhaps one of the reasons why we get no fine, nor even original, modern architecture is because the architect is so completely dissevered from the painter. Good as is much of his work, he has been educated in a groove of trim lines and tried effects, which he cannot get out of, nor do without. To the public, no doubt, a design which they have not seen before is as dreadful as the Ancient Mariner's glittering eye; but the artist, unlike the mechanic, educates his own public. Brunelleschi would not have been deterred from works of genius by the cavils of a vestry, nor William of Wykeham by the criticism of kings. Holbein's architectural designs have been remarked upon as resembling paintings: he introduced enrichments of terra-cotta, or moulded brickwork, inlaid his friezes with coloured tiles, made free use of paint and variegated bricks laid in zigzag patterns. The fact is, his painter's eye yearned for that without which form is but dead; and he made his buildings alive both with colour and form. The architect, with all his sense of proportion and delicate knowledge of light and shade, lacks one sense which the painter possesses, that of the value of colour.

He has educated it out of himself, and cannot learn it from his books and measuring-tools. He is so hampered by superstitions and opposition that he is often but an upper class builder, when he ought to be a 'phoenix for fine and curious masonrie.' The painter's wider experience and love of changing and brilliant effects is likely to have originated many splendid architectural works when it was, as once, associated with the builder's science. The warm bloom of colour which covered Greek buildings before time robbed them of their paint vivified the chaste and simple forms, which without it seem but cold and naked. Venetian Gothic was soft and lovely with colour - 'the whole front,' says Ruskin, 'of a Gothic palace in Venice may be simply described as a field of subdued russet quartered with broad sculptured masses of white and gold; these latter being relieved by smaller inlaid fragments of blue, purple, and deep green.' English Gothic was coloured and gilt outside and in, and resonant with the 'harmony' of many golden fanes, as I pointed out earlier.

Such buildings must perforce have been designed by artists, not architects merely: they were buildings wherein now colour modified the form, now was modified by it as the design grew beneath the hand. Such was the elasticity of the finest Gothic art, such the due use of one material with another.

We have small precedent for naked stone save the precedent of Decay, and the prejudices founded on forgetfulness. ' The Renascence frosts came, and all perished,' says Ruskin. But the artist and architect, working hand in hand, might still produce new forms guided by old principles, full of beauty, truly original, not affected nor uncomfortable, without persecuting early Gothic, Jacobian brick, or classic monuments with servile and insolent parodies.

Glazed brick and tiles are capable of endless variations and durability beyond any other materials in our humid air. With terra-cotta and stone successful experiments have already been tried by Mr. Street, Mr. Norman Shaw, Sir Gilbert Scott and his son, and others. But we shall never again have Brunelleschis and Buona-rottis till our architects climb out of the slot of the great Worm - Precedent - and begin to consider what is really wanted in an English building: comfort, light and shade, brightness, as well as grandeur of effect.

A few of our decorators have effected a revolution in the colouring of our rooms; it is time for an artist of sufficient calibre to attack the chairs and pianos, iron bedsteads and wardrobes. Our drapers already reproduce very fine tissues from antique designs which they have industriously studied; it is time for the public to insist that the material of which they are made is worth the money paid, and not a specious concoction of chemical mud which insults the purse and wastes the patience. Outside our houses we have begun to be clean, and occasionally handsome; let us within doors study to be both. If we admit pictures, let them be of the highest quality, and properly set in the wall. Few things and good are better than much refuse. If we employ table-plate, let it be plain and inoffensive like the well-hammered pieces in Anne's day, or really an art-treasure like early Renascence plate. Let us aim at producing a 'first impression' of comfort and pleasantness, and let us see that the details of such an ensemble do not disappoint a second or third glance.

In dress, I have long preached that reform is needful; even the reformers need reforming; and it should be our constant aim to check by our example the vagaries invariably resultant from vitiation of the accustomed eye without confining fancy to a groove.

Let us handcuff no one; individual opinion is too precious to be sacrificed, and in art matters it is better to bear with the blunders of those whose taste offends you, if their taste results from thinking for themselves, than to reduce everybody to a dead level of propriety by Act of Parliament. Still criticism should be as free as action, and the average opinion of the mass forms a healthy law in itself.

Culture is attained by plentiful experience, many mistakes, and continual study of 'the Reason why;' and this is possible only to those with open eyes and open minds.

But the artist, the true Phcenix, whether cultured or not, is born, not made.