Gothic had dealt with a special problem and treated it with fantastic logic-the roofing-in of a space with a stone vault on slender stone supports filled in with glass. Modern industry has invented another special architecture as original and daring, a roofing-in with glass on a structure of iron. But between these French and English adventures of religion and industry, between the cathedral and the railway-station, lies the mass of normal building in superposed flats for which there was little classic precedent; and, however internal construction may alter, the general conditions of the façade remain constant. There is nothing old-fashioned, as there was little revivalist, about Peruzzi's Palazzo Massimi.

But within the general conditions the French architects had a special problem set them. As distinguished from Italy, France is a northern country, darker, colder, more subject to rain and snow. This means architecturally more windows and larger windows in relation to wall-space; it means also chimneys and steeper roofs, and it is the business of the architect to come to terms with these necessities and get his effects accordingly. The problem of the windows is the most baffling. Restful spaces are eaten up by the insistent rows of holes. But for commodity the French' window, with its complement of persiennes, was an admirable solution of the problems of ventilation and light. Roofs and chimneys were another matter. Here were native elements that did promise fresh types, married to the Italian forms. The extravagant beauty of the highpitched roof of Fontaine-Henri, the grove of chimneys at Chambord, did count for something in the construction of the neo-classic architect, but intermittently. The roof and chimney as elements in design are sometimes accepted, sometimes denied. The Louvre of Perrault and the Garde Meuble of Gabriel minimise and conceal them with the feint of a balustraded terrace; nor are the roofs, when shown, always happily combined-the idea of the independent 'pavilion' was too strong. But the various ways of roofing a pavilion are among the French inventions; the 'Mansard' roof in particular was a stroke of economy in construction and of pleasure to the eye.

In planning, which is a main spur to the architect's invention, progress was somewhat lazy. The tradition of

the reckless spreading-out of buildings one room thick, with a series of rooms that had to serve also as passages, was hard to kill; and the contempt for convenience and comfort in other respects was extraordinary. Sir Reginald tells of kitchens at a vast distance from dining-rooms, of intolerably cramped servants' quarters, of stables in which horses could not lie down. But with the change of habits to a greater intimacy of life at court and from the rambling château to the more limited town-site, planning also changed; the modern house began to shape itself under Louis XIV and developed rapidly under his successor.

A gracious type, then, of civil and domestic building was the outstanding achievement of French architects in the 18th century, and their gift to other countries of Northern Europe. And Sir Reginald has defended the borrowed 'classic' elements in it as having been thoroughly incorporated in the French habit of design. Now we may freely admit that the shaping gift of the architect can obtain its effects from material that is in its nature accidental,' that is to say, not springing from structural necessities. This is notorious in Egyptian and Greek architecture; features proper to wooden construction persist in stone. Indeed, the purist would have to rule out a vast deal of ornament if he pressed for complete logic. The neo-classic architect, therefore, would be within his rights if he claimed to re-employ as decoration Greek constructive elements already wrought to fineness in a thrifty and intense research. Yet the critical mind will sooner or later quarrel with trimmings that have no expressive function. What about column and pilaster, capital and entablature? Have these no stronger basis than 'tradition,' no rationale that goes deeper than fondness for the past?

The modern house is in essence a series of great boxes placed one on the top of another and each of them pierced with a row of holes. These window holes are naturally, in such construction, rectangular, as in vaulted construction they were arched; the rectangular form, moreover, is the convenient one for window frames. Out of the bare elements of wall and window opening the sense of proportion might be baldly satisfied, but the designer's impulse demands some further play for the Vol. 236.-No. 469,

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eye. His first impulse is to call attention to the boundaries of his boxes, as in the border lines of a carpet or the mouldings of a chest that say, Here, just here, is the limit. Hence the storeys are made emphatic by projecting horizontal strips and mouldings, and most emphatic at the top, where these develop into a cornice. But if the façade be a long one, we now have a monotony of horizontal slices. The vertical divisions also call for expression; and, if it be inconvenient to advance or retire whole sections of the front, this also must be effected by advanced strips of the wall. But, when the vertical and horizontal strips meet, we are far on the way to reinventing pilaster and entablature, and complete the process if we mediate between the two, producing a capital. The three Greek forms are so obvious that if they had been buried in the sea they must have been recreated. Then comes a further step. A treatment of the front, stage by stage, is tiresome to the mind and eye, because the building appears not as one but as several things. By the use of an 'order' we can group two or more stages into one, with a basement or basement and attic, or even run the order up through the whole. In this way we play with proportions, getting, instead of one plus one plus one, one plus two and other variations. So, to group the horizontal elements, we can throw a pediment over a number of windows and tie them together for the eye.

It is no mere scholar's superstition, then, that accounts for the reappearance of those means of distribution and emphasis, though there is frequently superstition in the details; the main reason is designer's logic; and something very like them must have come about had the precedents never existed.

That the threads of neo-classic tradition have been effectively reknit in England by Sir Reginald Blomfield and his associates is a proof of its vitality and its best defence; but we may hope, in conclusion, that our author will not lay down his pen, but, working backwards, give us a history of the Italian Renaissance as well.

D. S. MACCOLL.

Art. 11.-CARDINAL MANNING.

1. Henry Edward Manning, His Life and Labours. By Shane Leslie. Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1921. 2. Eminent Victorians (Cardinal Manning). By Lytton Strachey. Chatto and Windus, 1918.

3. Cardinal Manning. By A. W. Hutton. Methuen, 1892. 4. The Life of Cardinal Manning, Archbishop of Westminster. By E. S. Purcell. Two vols. Macmillan, 1896. 5. Out of the Past, Vol. I. (Manning and the Catholic Reaction of our Times.) By Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff. John Murray, 1903.

6. Essays. (Life of Cardinal Manning.) By the Rev. H. I. D. Ryder. Longmans, 1911.

THE appearance, this year, of a new and very successful life of Cardinal Manning, as well as the priority accorded to a critique of his career in one of the most widely-read books of recent times, are in their way interesting and instructive phenomena. For something besides the talents of the authors and the merit of the subject has contributed to the good-fortune and high-favour of these biographical studies; and this is the apparently unexhausted magic of the Roman purple. The lives of princes, indeed, are at all times popular reading, but the lives of the princes of the Church enjoy some little pre-eminence of interest above the rest. A Cardinal adds or should add-startling paradox to supreme dignity. Pledged to maintain his position, clothed to outward appearance in purple and fine linen, attended even still sometimes by the pomp and circumstance of great place, he has to set forth in life, in word, in gesture, the very opposite of that which these things seem to imply. It is as if an athlete were set to run the hardest of races in the most cumbrous imaginable clothing, or a mountaineer to climb the steepest of mountains with the worst possible equipment. No wonder the world has watched with eager attention this walking about-as Bunyan has it-of religion in satin shoes. For as there has been no bolder attempt to lay the crown of Cæsar visibly at the feet of Christ, so success has often been wanting, and men have sometimes thought the thing attempted impossible and

Catholic asceticism incapable of triumphing over the glories the transient glories of earth. And even when this miracle of humility has been accomplished, and the sack-cloth of a saint has, as we might say, penetrated the splendour of the purple, there will still be those who doubt whether the human spirit is really sufficient for these things and for whom the paradox of the cardinalate continues to pass acceptance.

Everywhere, perhaps, princes of the Church are scanned with a certain suspicion, but in England, where, until lately, Cardinals were practically unknown and where Shakespeare has caused Beaufort and Wolsey to be unfavourably remembered, they used to be viewed with honest concern. There was probably no greater outburst of popular indignation in this country throughout the Victorian Age than that which greeted Cardinal Wiseman's letter reconstituting under papal sanction a Catholic, or, as some may prefer to say, a Roman Catholic, diocesan episcopate in England. And yetso just is the spirit of this country when it is calmthere was within this same period, if reports are to be trusted, no crowd so large as that which followed Wiseman's body to the grave except only that which went mourning for Wellington.

But among the four Cardinals with whose lives the English Catholic revival of the 19th century is bound up, it is probably the figure of Manning that best realises the English conception of a prince of the Church; and to this notion various circumstances have contributed. In the first place, his presence was precisely that which cardinals might be expected to possess. He was dignified and the master of an exquisite courtesy; he was impressive, as men are impressive who have had the best education and known the best society; in the severe lines of his ascetic face there lay, as it seemed, the traces of a perpetual rejection of that very world which all his natural being seemed to court; while his chequered career and unfamiliar creed raised among some of his contemporaries the suspicion that God and the Devil were fiercely contesting the possession of his soul. Then, in the second place, he was, what his countrymen love, a very practical and a very philanthropic man. No one of the other three Cardinals of