One day in 1874 I was on the tower of the Pleissenburg at Leipzig looking at the battlefield--it is a wide view, extending to Luetzen and the battlefield of 1632. There was an old man up there who had been in the great battle (1813) and I asked him whereabouts the windmill was, from which Napoleon watched it. He pointed out the windmill, and added with a grin, “Windmill burned down: man build another: man say it same.”--When the Campanile at Venice was being built up again, the brickwork ‘sweated’ and gave the red a curious tinge of white; and in the evenings in the glare of the Piazza I could have sworn it was the ghost of the old Campanile that I had seen there forty years before. That was in 1909; but when I saw it in 1913, I felt that the old Campanile had come to life again. If buildings are burnt out or tumble down, there is no remedy but reconstruction. But people are too fond of reconstructing buildings that are still intact, and making them ‘as good as new.’ If they want to know what a building looked like when it was new, they can surely build a copy of it somewhere else, and go and look at that: instead of putting a new front on the north transept of Westminster Abbey, they might have stuck it on a building like Truro Cathedral which is completely new. And the new front is not even a true copy of the original front--amongst other things, it has eleven little arches where there could never have been more than eight. When I go to see a historic building, I want to see it as it really was, not as a modern architect may think it should have been; and when I find a Thirteenth Century design just finished in fresh stone, I feel the work is out of date or I am out of date myself--instead of a black coat and chimney-pot, I ought to be in gold brocade with crimson tights and a feather in my cap. Judged by its architecture Truro Cathedral would be about two centuries earlier than the old church which is built into it, and it really is about four centuries later. The church may pass for an addition to an older building, when the new stonework has lost its glare. No doubt, in Burgos Cathedral the triforium is of an earlier style than the arches underneath it, though they were built at the same time; but Gothic was not indigenous in Spain, and Burgos was designed by German architects in an eclectic way. I do not think that this absurdity exists elsewhere, except as a result of alterations: at Furness Abbey, I feel sure, the arches in the transepts originally were round (like those in the triforium up above them) and were converted into pointed arches afterwards. The walls were weakened by these alterations, and that was why the central tower fell; at least, I think so.