About the year 1840 interest began to be taken in the old English styles of building, and a taste for Gothic architecture arose again. Since that time places of worship of all descriptions have for the most part been built in some sort of Gothic. When you read that such and such a church or building is in the fourteenth-or fifteenth-century style, you must understand that it is not a copy of a church built in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but that its window-heads, doorways, arches, and fittings are _in the style_ of the fourteenth or fifteenth century. Most of these modern buildings are of brick, only faced or dressed with stone. It is pretty safe to say that there is no old church standing which was built entirely in the fourteenth century, and has remained unaltered from that day to this. Nearly all the old churches have been restored, a good many of them several times during the last sixty or seventy years. Unfortunately, through ignorance, a good many interesting features in the old buildings were swept away during these "restorations". An old building needs very careful handling when we set about repairing it. In our towns almost every tower and spire which we see is a modern building, though the _styles_ may vary from Norman to Perpendicular and seventeenth century. Modern buildings, churches, halls, public offices, and private houses are mostly imitations of the work of past ages. There is no nineteenth-century style of English architecture. Some day, perhaps, England may develop a new style of architecture, such as the world has never yet seen, but at the present time we seem to be only able to copy and adapt the work of those who have gone before us. [Illustration: _King Edward VI's School and Alms Houses, Stratford-on-Avon_] CHAPTER XLV Schools after the Reformation A little of the property which had belonged to the religious houses was saved and turned to useful purposes. Just a very few of the old alms-houses were allowed to continue their work, like St. Cross at Winchester, and some schools and colleges were founded. There are quite a number of such schools which bear the name of King Edward the Sixth. But Edward VI was only a lad of sixteen when he died, and he had practically nothing to do with either the good or the evil which was done in his name. In other towns besides London, good men set to work and managed to get grants of some small parts of the property of old religious houses, and adapted them for school work. In some instances they were allowed to have part of an old ruin, which they patched up and turned into a schoolroom, and some of these queer old rooms continued in use for many generations. At St. Alban's the lady chapel at the east end of the Abbey Church was walled off from the main building in the time of Edward VI, and from that time it was used as the Grammar School until about a third of a century ago.