Even to descend to very inferior work--there is character and expression in the old King William houses on the river-bank at Chelsea, in the pretty little Queen Anne Square in Westminster; it is too neat and pretty to be high art, with its unobtrusive moulded brick, its shallow projections, and the carved shells over the doorways; but it is not unlike the poetry of Pope in the delicate finish and adaptation of its parts, while no one can deny that it has an individuality which the smart new houses in Grosvenor Place are totally without, where costly granite and excellent stone seem to have been employed to show the moral lesson that the best materials are of little service unless mixed "with brains, sir," as Opie advised. Every capital of the columns is carved by hand, but of the poorest design and all alike--it is hardly possible to conceive the poverty of invention involved in making every house and every ornament an exact copy of its neighbour, in a situation which invited picturesque treatment--after too, it had been shown at the Oxford Museum that carving was done both quicker and better when the workers exerted their minds in such inventions as they possessed (and some of their renderings of natural forms were beautiful) than when they merely followed a stereotyped pattern. At present we can as soon invent a new style for ourselves as a new animal; we copy, we combine--that is, under the Georgian era we added a Mahometan cupola to Roman columns in the Regent's Park; or, still later, we made one pediment serve for the whole side of a Belgravian square--_i.e._, a form intended for a nicely-calculated angle over the front of a temple with a particular number of columns, is stretched as on a rack over the roofs of an acre of houses; or we build a portico designed as a shelter against the cloudless sunshine of the Greek climate to darken a sunless English dwelling-house. Our last achievement has been to make a "pasticcio" of the high "mansarde" Parisian roofs, with hideous little debased Italian porticoes, a quarter of a mile of which may be seen in the Grosvenor Gardens district. Also we can patch and imitate--that is, rebuild a sham antique--from which, however ingeniously done, the ineffable charm of the original has escaped like a gas. Why the portico of the capital at Washington, or the monument on the Calton Hill at Edinburgh, whose columns are said to be "an exact copy of those at Athens," are so utterly uninteresting, it would take too long to explain; but no one will deny that they are mere lumps of dead stone, while the Parthenon itself, ruined and defaced, wrecked and ill-used, still stands like a glorious poem in marble, which no evil treatment can deprive of its charm. There is mind and soul worked into the material, and somehow inextricably entangled into it, which no copy, however exact, can in the least reproduce.