pass it over, since I have pressed on you the study of these ancient
monuments. Thus the matter stands: these old buildings have been
altered and added to century after century, often beautifully,
always historically; their very value, a great part of it, lay in
that: they have suffered almost always from neglect also, often
from violence (that latter a piece of history often far from
uninteresting), but ordinary obvious mending would almost always
have kept them standing, pieces of nature and of history.

But of late years a great uprising of ecclesiastical zeal,
coinciding with a great increase of study, and consequently of
knowledge of mediaeval architecture, has driven people into spending
their money on these buildings, not merely with the purpose of
repairing them, of keeping them safe, clean, and wind and water-
tight, but also of 'restoring' them to some ideal state of
perfection; sweeping away if possible all signs of what has befallen
them at least since the Reformation, and often since dates much
earlier: this has sometimes been done with much disregard of art
and entirely from ecclesiastical zeal, but oftener it has been well
meant enough as regards art: yet you will not have listened to what
I have said to-night if you do not see that from my point of view
this restoration must be as impossible to bring about, as the
attempt at it is destructive to the buildings so dealt with: I
scarcely like to think what a great part of them have been made
nearly useless to students of art and history: unless you knew a
great deal about architecture you perhaps would scarce understand
what terrible damage has been done by that dangerous 'little
knowledge' in this matter: but at least it is easy to be
understood, that to deal recklessly with valuable (and national)
monuments which, when once gone, can never be replaced by any