Vivian, George: A letter to W. R. Hamilton, Esq., with remarks on some passages in his second letter to the Earl of Elgin, on the propriety of adopting the Greek style of architecture, in the new Houses of Parliament (London, 1837)

15

the Elizabethan out of the question). I wish,
therefore, to be understood, when I speak of selec-
tion, judgment, decision, &c. upon erroneous prin-
ciples, or make any allusions of the kind, as re-
ferring, not to this or that step in the business, but
to the result; in which alone, as a part of the
public, I can take any interest, and on which alone
present and future generations will form their
judgment of what has been done. In noticing your
flattering, but fair reproaches, for not having come
forward earlier, to tell you the truth, I never
thought of saying a word on the subject, and be-
lieve never did, as to one style or another, till I saw
the whole mass of Designs, the rejected as well as
the selected, exhibited in Trafalgar Square ; when
they struck me as so unsatisfactory, so unmeaning,
so inadequate to the instruction and intelligence of
the present time, that I could not help reflecting
on the cause of the disappointment; and in the
course of conversation with many individuals, I
found they were nearly all of the same opinion.
There must, therefore, I thought, be something
radically wrong in the principle, on which the
whole had been conducted—and it was evident to
me, that when so many of our most eminent Archi-
tects had signally failed in responding to the sum-
mons, it could not possibly be their fault, that they
must have been set to work against their own con-
victions, and that the error lay somewhere else:
another reason for my being so late in the field is,