The spectacle of a summer traveller from London sketching
mediaeval details in these neo-Pagan days, when a lull has
come over the study of English Gothic architecture, through a
re-awakening to the art-forms of times that more nearly
neighbour our own, is accounted for by the fact that George
Somerset, son of the Academician of that name, was a man of
independent tastes and excursive instincts, who unconsciously,
and perhaps unhappily, took greater pleasure in floating in
lonely currents of thought than with the general tide of
opinion. When quite a lad, in the days of the French Gothic
mania which immediately succeeded to the great English-pointed
revival under Britton, Pugin, Rickman, Scott, and other
mediaevalists, he had crept away from the fashion to admire
what was good in Palladian and Renaissance. As soon as
Jacobean, Queen Anne, and kindred accretions of decayed styles
began to be popular, he purchased such old-school works as
Revett and Stuart, Chambers, and the rest, and worked
diligently at the Five Orders; till quite bewildered on the
question of style, he concluded that all styles were extinct,
and with them all architecture as a living art. Somerset was
not old enough at that time to know that, in practice, art had
at all times been as full of shifts and compromises as every
other mundane thing; that ideal perfection was never achieved
by Greek, Goth, or Hebrew Jew, and never would be; and thus he
was thrown into a mood of disgust with his profession, from
which mood he was only delivered by recklessly abandoning
these studies and indulging in an old enthusiasm for poetical
literature. For two whole years he did nothing but write
verse in every conceivable metre, and on every conceivable