beginning of the revival. Unfortunately, every cathedral is crowded through
the length and breadth of France with this abominable stuff, that is only
tolerable in a modern tasteless church, vulgar in its architecture and
insipid in its sculpture, but is painfully out of place in a venerable
minster.

The city of Marseilles has been lucky in securing a good architect for
the Church of S. Vincent de Paul, but in another architectural venture
Marseilles has been unfortunate. She was resolved to have a cathedral,
and she gave the designing of it to a man void of taste, who has built a
hideous erection on the quay in what he is pleased to call Byzantine style.
I am quite sure any Byzantine architect would cheerfully have jumped into
the Bosphorus rather than disfigure a city with such a structure as Notre
Dame.

The Germans have a saying that the higher a monkey climbs the more he
exposes his monkeyishness; and unfortunately this architect has been
allowed to climb very high. He was given the peak of Notre Dame de la
Garde, that towers over Marseilles, on which to erect a church. The site is
exceptionally good, one on which a man of ordinary genius would have done
something, could hardly have failed to have done something, that would have
been picturesque. But such is the perversity of this unfortunate man's
talent that he has erected a structure on the limestone crag, of almost
miraculous hideousness. It is also in so-called Byzantine architecture.
There is a dish-cover which serves as a dome, and a tower which would be
comical if it were not irritating. It resembles the handle of a renaissance
knife or fork stuck into a sheath and standing upright with a figure at
top. We have made a blunder at South Kensington in setting side by side
a depressed dome--the Albert Hall, and the acute pinnacle of the Albert
Memorial; but a road runs between them, and it is possible to shut one eye