SAMUEL PROUT
HAS full justice been done to Samuel Prout, the artist? I doubt it. True that Ruskin recognized his great merits, but the public generally has not acknowledged, indeed, has not realized, the revolution in taste due mainly to this shy, unassertive man.
What man in his century had dreamed, before Prout issued his sketches, that there was exquisite beauty in old English cottages? He arose at a time when attention was being drawn to Gothic architecture, and there was a growing recognition of its merits in cathedral, church, and mansion. Architects with tape and foot-rule measured and planned, with lead-tape took mouldings. They learned the principles of Gothic and Tudor architecture. They gathered and studied details. But the soul, the spirit escaped them. When they undertook to design and build new churches and mansions, they turned out very poor, uninteresting stuff. Rickman erected the new courts of St. John's College, Cambridge, a monstrous pile of ugliness, bad even in its details. Blore built the chapel of Marlborough College, a horror, now happily transformed. Sir Gilbert Scott designed numerous churches, all of borrowed detail, and all utterly uninteresting. It was the same on the Continent. In France, Viollet le Duc studied throughout France, knew the purest French styles intimately, but could produce nothing good him-
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