Sacrilege
O Atlas! What of the “Society for the Preservation of Beautiful Buildings”?
Upon the Alterations of the “White House.”
Where is Ruskin? and what do Morris and Sir William Drake?
For, behold! beside the Thames, the work of desecration continues, The World, Oct. 17, 1883. and the “White House” swarms with the mason of contract.
The architectural galbe that was the joy of the few, and the bedazement of “the Board,” crumbles beneath the pick, as did the north side of St. Mark’s, and history is wiped from the face of Chelsea.
Shall no one interfere? Shall the interloper, even after his death, prevail?
Shall ’Arry, whom I have hewn down, still live among us by outrage of this kind, and impose his memory upon our pavement by the public perpetration of his posthumous philistinism?
Shall the birthplace of art become the tomb of its parasite in Tite Street?
See to it, Atlas! lest, when Time, the healer of all the wounds I have inflicted, shall for me have exacted those honours the prophet may not expect while alive, and the inevitable blue disc, imbedded in the walls, shall proclaim that “Here once dwelt” the gentle Master of all that is flippant and fine in Art, some anxious student, reading, fall out with Providence in his vain effort to reconcile such joyous reputation with the dank and hopeless appearance of this “model lodging,” bequeathed to the people by the arrogance of ’Arry.