No doubt we have improved in our street architecture; there are isolated specimens of red brick, a shop-front in South Audley Street, and one in New Bond Street, several excellent buildings in the city, &c, &c, legitimate adaptations of gables, dormers, and windows, exceedingly good of their kind; but these are not original creations, only developments of what already exists. There is one point in which our present shallow, unintelligent education has wrought irreparable mischief. We have learnt so much of respect for art as to desire to preserve the works of our forefathers, but not so far as to find out how this is to be done. We set to work to "restore" them. Every inch of the surface of an old church is historical as to the manner of the handiwork of the men of the twelfth, thirteenth, or whatever may be the century, and we proceed to put a new face on it, which, at the best, must certainly be that of the nineteenth century; we find a defaced portrait statue on an altar-tomb (as in a church in Devonshire), and we insert a smooth mask out of our own heads; we find an Early English tower with walls fourteen feet thick, and think a vestry would be "nicer" in its place, and the tower is therefore pulled down and rebuilt at the other end of the nave (as in a church in Bucks); or a curious monument to the fifth son of Edward III., or a couple of kneeling figures, clad in ruffs and farthingales, of an old rector and his wife, are within the communion rails (as in two other churches in Bucks); the incumbents do not approve of tombs in such "sacred places," and, regardless of the curious historical fact shown by the very position itself in pre-Reformation days, they are ruthlessly rooted up, and in the latter case a flaming brass to the rector's own family substituted. Even a little art education would show us that this is not "restoration;" it may be a much finer and smarter kind of work, as many people seem to consider it; but the cutting down an inch of the splendid carved stone porches at Chartres to a new surface is not "restoring" that which was there before--the face of the fifteenth-century lady cannot be "restored" without a portrait which no longer exists--the new tower may be very "pretty," but it is certainly no longer a specimen of rare old Early English work. Like the monks of old carefully scratching their invaluable parchment manuscripts, to put in their own words and notes, we have at one fell swoop scratched the history of English ecclesiastical art off the land, and archæologists are inquiring sadly for instances of unrestored churches, which, alas! now are scarcely to be found.