People talk of Horace Walpole, of Sir Walter Scott, or of any one else they like, as the early promoters of the feeling which led to the revival. I do not know how it may have been with others, but, for myself, I know that my love for Gothic architecture was absolutely spontaneous, and that I had no kind of incentive for following up its study other than the delight I took in it, before I knew a word about other architecture, or was acquainted even with the published works on our own, and that, without a thought of its study ever becoming practically useful to me. I am convinced that the revived love for our old buildings, followed as it was subsequently by a desire to imitate their architecture, was as spontaneous and as irresistible a movement of the human mind as those which had originated either Classic or Mediæval art, or that which, two thousand years after its first rise, had led to the revival of the former. It is true that its results have not yet been so all-pervading as those of the Classic Renaissance, yet they have been very great; out and away the most marked feature in modern architectural history, inasmuch as it, almost alone, has resulted from ardent and genuine enthusiasm, and from the inmost recesses of the heart. As one of the survivors from among the more active of the earlier agents in this great movement, I may claim a right to dilate a little on my reminiscences of it. In writing respecting it, nearly nineteen years ago, when my memories were more fresh, I made the following remarks:-- I described the movement as “being the development of a new and vigorous style upon the foundation of the glorious architecture of our own country and of our own forefathers, in the place of one at once alien to our race and our religion. “This,” I went on to say, “I need hardly tell you is a mighty and most arduous undertaking--so mighty indeed, and so arduous, that I doubt whether, if it had been in the first instance fully appreciated, any body of men could have been found with sufficient daring to set about it. The strength, however, of the movement lies in the fact that it was not deliberate nor preconcerted, but was the involuntary working out of a deeply-seated mental revolution. It was not that a body of men deliberately banded themselves together to carry out and propagate particular tastes or opinions; such would have been but a feeble, or at best an ephemeral and merely local movement; it was rather that a number of persons, in different neighbourhoods and countries, and without any concert, had been led by their own unbiassed and unguided instincts to an appreciation of the long-neglected beauties of our own indigenous architecture. This” (with other feelings), I proceeded to say, “had led them first to study, then to imitate, and ultimately to attempt the revival of the style which had thus involuntarily approved itself to their natural perceptions of what is right and beautiful.