In these days of miscellaneous distraction, it is difficult to give advice as to the choice of a groundwork of study. Having no actual style belonging to our age, you must choose between the two Renaissances,--the Classic and the Gothic,--as best you may. It was my own lot, arising from the period at which I commenced, to have been trained in one (at its deadest period), and to have, from the love of it, trained myself in the other; but I will suppose, for simplicity’s sake, a single and simple choice. Nor is it for me to dictate, were it in my power to do so, what that choice should be. What I have to say is that, your choice being made, you must study with all diligence, and with the most assiduous attention, the best and purest examples of the style you have chosen; making yourself thoroughly acquainted with it from its very root to its minutest details, and using every endeavour to catch the true artistic spirit of the style in its best phases. If Classic architecture (whether antique or as revived) be your aim, you are at some disadvantage from not having within your reach its most authentic examples. Books and the works of our own best architects must supply the need till you have opportunity to study it in its native land. If Gothic architecture is that on which your loving choice has fallen, you are more happily situated. Then you are not studying an imported art, but that of your own country; you have not to travel widely from home to study its noblest productions, for they are at your very doors; you have not to go through a long course of book-study, treating of examples of art which you have no means of seeing and studying with your own eyes; but, though not rejecting books, you may go from them to the originals and judge of them for yourselves. Even if kept pretty closely in London or its vicinity, you do not want opportunity for the study from its noblest productions of the art of your choice. The glorious fane of St. Peter at Westminster supplies an inexhaustible fund for study, while the history of Mediæval art may be followed up by the aid of such examples as the Chapel in the Tower, St. Bartholemew’s Priory Church, the Temple Church, St. Saviour’s, Westminster Hall, Crosby and Eltham Halls, and other minor examples; while an hour’s run will take you to the stupendous church of England’s proto-martyr, which equals its sister abbey as a fund of artistic study and information. The advice, then, I give to the student of Mediæval art is, lose no opportunity of studying and carefully sketching from old examples, wherever they may be found; nor, I would add, should you neglect the aid afforded by collections of objects of study such as our museums contain;[72] but study not only the mere facts, but the spirit and sentiment of the style you are learning.