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)

17

excite original genius. Very few individuals in
England even now understand what a Greek
temple was. The sight of one in all its perfec-
tion and beauty, (I do not wish to enter upon
the large and doubtful question of Polychromy),
would, I think, with all our present advan-
tages of wealth, instruction, patriotic feeling,
enterprizing spirit, and cultivated understandings,
infuse a real taste for genuine, uncorrupted archi-
tecture, and I cannot doubt its applicability, when
skilfully managed, to all our purposes. The Greeks
themselves, as long as they were a free and en-
lightened people, may be said to have copied one
another, and yet every one of their temples had
something original, something of its own in its con-
struction ; and when you have once got hold of a
good principle, and stick to it, little else compara-
tively is wanted to execute what is good. This is
of very questionable expediency, how far you should
encourage any attempt to strike out something new,
something that shall combine the advantages of
the ancient and the modern—that is, of the Greek
and Gothic styles. It would, I fear, be but a recur-
rence to the pasticcios of Italy, France, and Ger-
many, or to that which we call the Elizabethan
manner. At any rate, let the ground-work be
Greek, the principles of whose architecture are as
universal as those of the language, in which they
were first expressed; but now I apprehend, if we
are to have a Gothic House of Parliament, the pro-