“For that period of just five hundred years so regular was the development that it is not too much to say that a well-informed architect or antiquary ought always to be able to give, within ten or at most twenty years, the date of any, however small a portion, of Mediaeval architecture with almost absolute certainty of being correct when his judgement can be tested by documentary evidence.” That was his practice, the _élan_ of his own judgement, as certain as the stroke of his pencil, which other architects, of other nations, have delighted to honour. Señor Lampérez, in his great book on Spanish architecture, bears generous and graceful witness to the justness and certitude of Street’s conjectures. He even gives him the credit of finding the date of S. Maria at Benavente, now known to be 1220, though in point of fact Street had set down as opinion and not knowledge that the church must have been built between 1200 and 1220. The only case in which I know his instinct at fault is that of the belated churches of Galicia, where Romanesque forms persisted sometimes even into the fifteenth century. There, knowing few dates of buildings and fewer of builders, he hardly estimated them enough of laggards, and guesses wrong sometimes by a century, or nearly. Precisely in a case like this, where an unknown condition vitiates the experiment, one sees how just is his method and how right in all but the actual year of our Lord, even here, is the outcome. The steady judgement, the wide knowledge, the happy divination, which we call genius, cannot play false. While the saint, by ancient dogma, cannot sin, the foredamned cannot do right; and the provincial-minded, even though all the data lie before him, is foredoomed by his _campanilismo_ to come out wrong. It is, moreover, a trifle ungrateful in a few young Spaniards and a few fretful Hispanophils to scold at Street, for he was the best friend and the most practical, outside the Peninsula, that Spain had ever had--not forgetting either the Duke of Wellington or Murray’s Ford. Let me quote again Señor Lampérez, what he has to say at the opening of his admirable _Historia de la Arquitectura Española Cristiana_: “Two foreigners deserve especial place and mention in this survey, the English Street and the French Enlart. Street was an architect, profoundly versed in Christian art, Gothic in chief; he had studied the monuments of it all over Europe; he visited Spain and before her churches he sketched and took notes with so sure a vision that his book on Gothic Art [_sic_] in Spain has come to be, if I may say so, classic. It is the greater pity that Street saw of Spain only one very small part. On any count, his work is of exceptional importance. His text is too widely known for me to need to analyze it here; suffice it to say that his method is based on a technical study of each building, without any divagation into poetic descriptions or literary lucubrations.”