Beyond these there was another class of men who had but little sympathy with Greece or Rome, and still less with mediæval monasticism or feudalism, but who in their own strong sense were inclined to take a more reasonable view of the matter, and these men have for years been erecting in London, Manchester, Leeds, and in other cities of England a series of warehouses and other buildings designed wholly with reference to their uses, and ornamented only in their construction, and which consequently are—as far as their utilitarian purposes will allow—as satisfactory as anything of former days. In addition to these, and within the last fifteen to twenty years, a very great progress has taken place in domestic architecture, not only in London and its suburbs, but throughout England, where buildings have been erected of a new and an original type, peculiarly applicable to the requirements of English domestic life, and of great variety and picturesque design; and these remarks apply not only to mansions, but to the residences of a much humbler and more simple kind. In civil engineering, the lowest and most prosaic branch of architectural art, our progress has been brilliant and rapid. Of this no better example can be given than the four great bridges erected over the Thames. The old bridges of Westminster and Blackfriars, and those of Waterloo and London, were erected at nearly equal intervals during one century, and the steady progress which they exhibit is greater than that of almost any similar branch of art during any equal period of time. In this department our progress is so undeniable that we saw old London Bridge removed without regret, though it was a work of the same age and of the same men who built all our greatest and best cathedrals, and in its own line was quite as perfect and as beautiful as they. But it had outlived its age, and we knew we could replace it by a better—so its destruction was inevitable; and if we had made the same progress in the higher that we have in the lower branches of the building art, we should see a Gothic cathedral pulled down with the same indifference, content to know that we could easily replace it by one far nobler and more worthy of our age and intelligence. No architect during the Middle Ages ever hesitated to pull down any part of a cathedral that was old and going to decay, and to replace it with something in the style of the day, however incongruous that might be; and if we were progressing as they were, we should have as little compunction in following the same course.