build upon.” The premises here referred to are 35, King’s road, those in the occupation of Mr. Ridley, boot and shoe maker. In the same Diary, date Monday, September 7th, 1778, he remarks: “Mr Alderman Bull, of London, is building a house on the Clift; a semicircular window is in each story. Am told he meets with many obstacles in the execution of his design.—Surely it is to the interest of these people (meaning the inhabitants) to have such men become resident among them; but he is denied a convenient entrance to his building. A cellar window to the adjoining house projects before his street door.” That Brighton at the present day possesses fine architectural features cannot be denied. The magnificent Squares and Crescents which flank its sea-frontage, and even form part of the frontage, possess strong claims on our admiration, especially when we glance at the general state and style of architecture of our time, and reflect upon the rapid rise and development of the town—looking to what it was and considering what it is. During the close of the last, and the beginning of this century, architecture had reached its lowest ebb in England. Our true indigenous Gothic had almost passed into a tradition: the Classic models, from their extreme ill-adaptation to our climate, had undergone such deterioration, that the application of the term even to the best of later works was an absurdity. The influence of Sir Christopher Wren had been of the most baneful character; not that he was himself deficient in genius, but that his style, which hardly attains to grandeur even in the Metropolitan Cathedral, was of a character which inevitably degenerated in feeble hands. Thus it happened that we were left almost without a national style, or, at least with one utterly devoid of intrinsic merit of any kind. The churches and other public buildings were erected upon no principles; and in accordance only with the taste, or want of taste, in the architect, who no longer represented an Art, but devoted himself to a Profession. Of course, when all the higher and more important offices of architecture were thus indifferently served, it was not to be expected that street-architecture would fare very happily. Our streets, in fact, gradually lost all their picturesqueness and variety of the olden times, and gained neither dignity nor beauty. Complacent builders shrugged their shoulders in pity at ancestors who had covered houses with roofs like over-sized wigs; or had recourse to hanging stories one projecting over the other until the light of heaven only stole into the streets through a narrow aperture above the road. But though these things were quaint and barbarous, there was a something about them which had in it the sense of beauty,—something which makes one even now prefer the High Street of Eastgrinstead to the latest built, the most elegant and supernaturally genteel of our modern terraces.