“Yes,” said Pinch. “Yes. Do, please. Good bye. Good bye. I can hardly believe you’re going. It seems now but yesterday that you came. Good bye! my dear old fellow!”
John Westlock returned his parting words with no less heartiness of manner, and sprung up to his seat upon the roof. Off went the mail at a canter down the dark road: the lamps gleaming brightly, and the horn awakening all the echoes, far and wide.
“Go your ways,” said Pinch, apostrophizing the coach; “I can hardly persuade myself but you’re alive, and are some great monster who visits this place at certain intervals, to bear my friends away into the world. You’re more exulting and rampant than usual to-night, I think: and you may well crow over your prize; for he is a fine lad, an ingenuous lad, and has but one fault that I know of: he don’t mean it, but he is most cruelly unjust to Pecksniff!”
PROFESSOR COCKERELL’S LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY.
This gentleman, who succeeded the late lamented Mr. Wilkins in the professor’s chair of the Royal Academy, is labouring with all the generous energy for which he is distinguished, to lay the products of a well-stored mind before the students, so as to excite them to an emulation of the works and achievements of the great masters in Architecture who have gone before. We have had the pleasure of attending the course of lectures of this session, and were greatly rejoiced to find, from the numbers and character of the auditory, that the study of the art is being regarded with interest by many out of the pale of the profession. It would have been a grateful duty to us to have given a full report of these lectures for the benefit of our readers, but we felt to be precluded from doing so, by a previous announcement on the part of the Athenæum of the intention to do so, and which has since been very effectively carried out. In justice to that excellent periodical, we can, therefore, only refer to its pages those of our readers who may be anxious to give that attentive perusal of the lectures which they require and deserve, contenting ourselves with the liberty of making such extracts as we think will suit the purpose of our less ambitious readers, or to whet the appetite of the others.
There is one thing, however, in which even the comprehensive report of the Athenæum is necessarily defective. Such a display of illustrative drawings, so laboriously compiled, as were exhibited by the learned lecturer, it has never before been our good fortune to see brought together; and without these, or some more adequate representation of them than mere description, the spirit or essence of the lecture is greatly weakened, and in some instances lost. Two large sheets, or rather assemblage of sheets, were hung up, shewing in comparative juxta-position most of the famous structures of antiquity, the one in elevation, the other in section, and over these the eye could wander and the mind could dwell with marvellings and delight that no words can express. How small appear those finished and exquisite gems of Grecian art, its temples, when compared with the developed boldness of the works of the successors to the Greek school, who have been charged with innovations and corruptions. These great sheets present to us a map or chart reduced, as it were, to a small scale, of the hitherto ascertained geography of building art, and suggest an endless train of reflection and inquiry.
But there were others whose assemblage and lengthened treatment would make up volumes, some embodying the ingenious speculations of the professor, but, in the main, rigid and critical delineations of the buildings of the ancients from measurement and other laborious means of research.
These, however, it would be quite in vain for us to attempt to enumerate, or to refer to in any more lengthened way of notice; we therefore proceed to our extracts.
After quoting the regulations of the Royal Academy in reference to the delivery of these lectures, and pointing out how much it is desirable to add to their provisions in this respect, on the model of the French Academy, the effects of which are visible in the advantages which the architects of that country enjoy; and contrasting the pains taken by the governments of the Continent in the encouragement and cultivation of art, with the niggard policy pursued in this country, he says—
“It is now more than a hundred years that Thomson, the best informed upon the Arts of all our poets, indignantly remonstrated on our national inferiority and neglect of this branch of intellectual culture, and complained with grief, in his Ode to Liberty,—