THIS series of books was designed for the amateur, with the
object of supplying in the simplest language that general
information demanded by innate appreciation. The need for
some such series of handbooks has been shown by the
favourable reception accorded by critics and the public to the
five volumes that have appeared, the gratifying demand for
which has already promoted two of them to a second edition.

I have always felt a keen joy in the art of architecture, and in
my opinion the architect is an artist whose work is as full of
expression as is that of the most skilled decorator who serves
him. In proportion, perspective, line and mass, he visualizes
universal truths, and seals them so clearly with the stamp of a
strong individuality that they stimulate imagination and awaken
the emotions. As a child, my favourite playground was the
Close in my native city -- Nature's unrivalled setting, wherein
the dazzling beauty of an English cathedral is enhanced by the
fields, and trees, and grassy swards which surround it, and,
maybe, by the river which skirts them on this side or that.
Why I liked to look at the cathedral I neither knew nor cared;
it just pleased me, and children ask neither more nor less of
life. Under the great vaulted roof I was equally happy and
equally indifferent to logic, until I first began to feel that desire
to grow up which is the actual starting-point of education.
Hitherto I had been content to listen to the endless store of
fairy-tales which the building was ever ready to relate, but now I
became more exacting.

'Tell me how you came to be here,' I said to the arches, walls,
and columns; 'tell me how you live; tell me something real.'

-v-