The Sun.
London, England, 1852-09-17 00:00:00

DEATH OF MR. A. IV. PUGIN.
Our readers will learn with mingled feelings that
the final niche has been set to that eclipse of intellect
which had so awfully arrested, in its noon of vigour,
the brilliant and useful career of Ur. Pugin. His
decease took place at his residence,
at Banisgate, on
Tuesday, the 14th instant, at five in the evening.
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin was the only
child of Augustus Pugin by his marriage with a
member of the Welby family, of Denton, in Lin-
colnshire, now represented by Sir W. E. Welby,
Bart. _ _

Augustus Pugin, a native of France, though settled
in England, was by profession an architectural drafts-
man, and was much distinguished in the revival of
painted architecture which has characterised this
century, by various valuable and elaborately illus-
trated works, descriptive of mediaeval architecture,
brought out in concert with Mr. 13ritton and Mr.
Le Keux. Though he never practised as a con-
structive architect, several well known architects
wire trained in his office, of whom his own more
eminent son stood foremost. 'lnns trained in the
daily study of those forms of whose manipulation
he was to become so great a master, young Pugin
first appeared before the world as the editor of a post-
humous work of his fattier. His own earliest publi-
cation was, we believe, a series of illustrations of
mediaeval metal work. At this period of his life
occurred that event to which we look back with the
least pleasure—we mean his secession to the Church
of Rome. In Pugin's case, however, there were
circumstances which rendered this secession most
widely different from similar events which have
subsequently occurred. In the first
place, the Church
of England of those days was, in appearance, an
entirely different thing from the Church of England
of this day, permeated and revivified by the Church
revival. It was not, therefore, to be so much won-
dered at that Pugin, young and enthusiastic, and
existing on the architectural glories of medimval
Christendom, should in those times have been unable
to see the Church of England,
such as she was twenty
years back, as we now behold her. Again, his heredi-
tary religion was Romanistn. Ilis father was a Roman
Catholic till he settled in England, and if he ever
formally conformed to the Church of England, it is
not on record that he illustrated his new profession by
any extraordinary exhibition of z.al. Besides, of
Pugin it can be said that he bas evinced a feeling
regarding the Church of England very far removed
from that manifested by later convt?rts. He threw
himself indeed, particularly in his latter days, most
warmly into everything which betokeneh! life in the
English Church, with which he sympathioed to the
fullest extent of the tether of a sincere Roanan Ca-
tholic.

About this time Mr. Pugin made his earliest con-
spicuous appearance before the public in his pe‘luliar
line, by the publication of his racy and original
" contrasts ;" or, to quote the remainder of the t; tie
page, "a parallel between the noble edifices of We
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and similar build-
ings of the present day, showing the present decay
of taste, accompanied by appropriatevo-
lume, bearing date 1836, and text." The
ssuing from " St. Mary's
Grange, near Salisbury" (a house which Mr. Pugin
i
had built for himself; and was then inhabiting),
showed that its writer and artist was a man of no or-
dinary stamp. Open to criticism
as were some of
the antithetic and trenchant plates, and no little
of the equally antithetic and trenchant prose of
this quarto, it was still a bi▪ t
—a palpable, unmistake-
able hit—in spite of its being written as if to aggra-
vate all the prevalent feeling of the age, by telling it
the bluntest and most disagreeable truths in the
bluntest possible manner. In proof of that remark-
able necessity which guided, while it impelled, the
natural impetuosity of Paw▪
n's temperament, we may
observe that in the second edition of this volume,
published five years later, much of the text is re-
written,
mote from blind, one-sided partisanship. It is ob-
servable that, in this second edition, " middle ages"
is substituted in the title-page for " fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries."

Just as this period the communion to which
Mr. Pugin had joined himself evinced considerable
energy of church building, and his constructive as
well as his literary abilities soon found consider-
able employment. His first church was that little
Romanesque chapel so conspicuous from the rail-
way station at Reading. This was soon followed
by the more important new Roman Catholic
churches at Derby, Macclesfield, Hulme near Man-
chester, and Birmingham, the latter designated
from the first as a cathedral. It would be, of
course, unfair to criticise these early attempts
at illustrating principles so long allowed to rest in
oblivion. Indeed, their architect has rendered any
criticism out of the question by the openness with
which, in his later writings, he has dissected those
very structures upon which his earliest reputation was
so deservedly, for the time, based. Among his ear-
liest and most constant patrons, the Earl of Shrews-
bury and Mr. Ambrose Lisle Phillips stood conspi-
cuous. Commissions flowed rapidly in, and among
the numerous structures which he built we shall only
mention the large Roman Catholic churches of St.
George, in Southwark ; St. Barnabus, in Notting-
ham ; Cheadle, built for Lord Shrewsbury ; the Cis-
tercian Abbey of St. Bernard, reared in the moun-
tainous tract of Leicestershire, upon a wild moor be-
longing to Mr. Phillips
; Alton Castle, near Alton
Towers ; and the Roman Catholic cathedrals at Kil-
larney and Enniscorthy, in Ireland. Numerous,
however, as were the churches which own the name
of Pugin, there is not one in which this great
architect had fully fair play. Vast results
for insufficient means--large congregations and
spreading areas, with scanty money to cover
them—were, we believe, all but invariably the con-
ditions upon which he found that his services would
be at all accepted. And when these services had
been engaged, ignorance, prejudice, and all the
obstinate caprice of amateur false taste and sacer-
dotal self-sufficiency, were put in play to mar. the.
result. In that work of his, for example,
most accessible, the church of St. George, in South-
wark—now elevated in the new hierarchy to cathe-
. him to refrain from decorating
dral dignity—Pugin found himself called upon to
in. extent
for a real cathedral, a church whose stated price com-
pelledal-
most indispensable feature, much smaller
even of a
church—the. clerestory—while (as he published.) at
the time fighting a battle with the wise committee
which affected to control him, in order to . make.
sure of even as much it with that a
chancel as the building
now possesses. At last it was built and opened,
and soon after its opening was
dral ; and persons who are not acquainted with
.its
history visit it, and go away with the impression
that that " this is Pugin's a cath.e-
Even in the one instance where he had almost carte.
blanche—the church at Cheadle—be was placed in a
type
of proclaimed
position of great disadvantage, for be was first en-
joined. to build a small and cheap church, and after its
ground plan had been set, he was enjoined to develop
it into a very dear one, and yet was not allowed to
alter that plan so much as to give the proper length
tahimederdal church.
which he desired to the chancel ; while driven by the
haste of the patron for whom he was working to go
to an excess of mere colour, as little to be defended
on the principles of sound esthetics, as it can
•
Justly be charged upon Pugin. It is well known
that the only building of his which he looked upon
with anything like unalloyed satisfaction,
.was that
small but solid and original church which he so
munificently erected upon his own land, next his
own house at Ramsgate—the one church of which
he was at once architect and directorsgeneral. And
latterly—the truth must be told—this great man did
not receive from the members of his own communion
that support which he had a right to expect. Various
Roman Catholic architects bad grown up i . n the
school of Pugin, imbued with Puginesque principles,
and gifted, it may be, with that malleability of temper
which might perhaps induce them to carry out those
principles more complyingly than the great head of
the school would have consented to do ; and accord-
ingly they thus found churches to build in plenty,
while " Pugin" was called in for the painted glass, or
the metal work. Stern justice, of course, compelled
critics to notice, while he was yet living, the short-
comings of Pugin's works; but equal justice compels
US now to say that we believe that he did not receive
that measure of (airplay which his deserts demanded.
It is hardly necessary for t 3 here to notice—well
known as the fact is—how much that great national
work, the "Palace of AVestminster" has all along
owed to the taste and talents of
.Pugin, ungrudgingly
bestowed to help its architect in carrying out that
vast and intricate edifice. Sir Charles Barry, we feel
convinced, will be glad to reflect that future ages
will connect the name of Pugin with his, in speaking
of that gigantic reproduction of a longsforgotten
style of indigenous architecture. Cut off compa-
ratively in his youth—without a title, and not R.A.
—Pugin's is yet a name with which the most de-
corated of artists need never blush to have been as-
sociated.

plying his pencil, Pugin did
But while assiduously
not suffer his pen to rest in idleness. His Contrasts
were, after an interval of a few years, followed by his
two lectures on the true principle of Christian archi-
tecture, to which a smaller volume, called " An
. written by Pugin,
Apology for Christian Architecture," formed a
sequel. C
. loin
nmthuen yearsionin England, 1841 and 1842, two articles,
on the revival of church architecture in the
d profusely adorned with illustrations of
his works, appeared in the Dublin Review,and were subsequently republished in a N-
lume. His Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament
showed considerable research, and is beautifully
illustrated; and at a much later period, 1849, he pro-
'inced a most graceful volume of " fl oriated orna-
ment" in chromolithograph, being illustrations of
how the forms of living flowers can be adapted to the
symmetrical shapes required in ecclesiastical ornament.

About this period some of the more active of the re-
cent
rians," and the writers in the Rambler—rendered
themselves very conspicuous by the extravagant and
offensive manner in which they combined their advo-
cacy of the most extreme ultramontane doctrines
with an original system of church arrangement and
decoration, founded on the conventicle idea of making
churches mere balls for seeing and hearing, and on a
mawkish predilection for modern Italian architecture,
as the architecture of modern Rome. Pugin, as
might he supposed, was equally disgusted and angered
by this ridiculous display of neophyte presumption,
and met it with a series of very vigorous and plain-
spoken articles, in which he spoke of the present Eng-
glish Church in a tone remarkable in the productions
of a member of the Roman Church. It is understood
that at the period of his lamented illness he was en-
gaged upon a larger and more elaborate work upon
the same subject.
While studying architecture, Pugin was equally
zealous
and successful in his cultivation of the arts
subordinate to it. To painted glass and mediaeval
metal work he devoted peculiar attention, and under
hie directing care Mr. Hardman, of Birmingham,
established his beautiful ateliers in these two branches'
of art. Among the numerous courts in the Crystal
Palace few attracted more attention and gave more
delight than Pugin's " Medieval Court," rich in
these departments. We may also observe that the
eminent builder, Mr. Myers, was first noticed and
encouraged by Pugha's discerning patronage.
His skill as an artist was remarkable. The public
are pretty well aware of his powers as an architec-
tural draftsman. .But as a landscape artist and a
colourist his talents, were moat striking, and he
had no greater pleasure than to show his port-
folios of water-colour sketches, hit off with the
rapidity of lightning, and embodying some pic-
turesque nook of a Kentish field, or some transitory
effect of brilliant sun-set which had arrested his ready
glance.
Innumerable are the anecdotes current among his
friends of the characteristic, often eccentric, always
energetic, and always warm-hearted brusquerie of
Pugin's character. He was a very Boythorn ; and
woe to the Skimpole who tried to humbug him, or the
Dedlock who essayed to lord it over him. To the last
he combined a love of the sea as only second to his
love of a Gothic church, and at one time he owned,
and sometimes commanded, a merchant smack trading
with Holland. The proximity of the sea was one
great inducement which led him to fix his abode at
Ramsgate ; and among the appendages of his me-
diaeval dwelling was a large cutter, with which he
was always prepared, with his merry men, to push off
to the rescue of any vessel in distress upon the Good-
wins. His short figure, dark complexion, and habitual
attire had always more about them to remind a
stranger of the sailor, than to give any clue to the
person before him being the great Christian artist.
Mr. Pugin was thrice married, and leaves a widow
and a large family. We doubt not that his national
deserts will receive public attention to them, as we
fear that at the time of his seizure he was far from
affluent. —Chronicle.

NAVAL 1 PI TELLIGENCE.
APPOINTMENTS.

Lieutenant G. W. .E. Lloyd (1849), to the Ter-
magant, 24, screw-fri:ote, Portsmouth; J. H. Crang
(1840), to the Hercules emigrant-ship, Chatham.
Assistant-Surgeons--Dr. J. Barclay (1846), to the
Dee steam-vessel, Woolwich ; Dr. Thomas B. Parches
(1847), to the Electra, 14, Portsmouth.
mate..—W. H. Burnaby, to the Megeera screw-
troop-ship, Sheerness.
Midshipmen—T. W. Howorth, to the Electra ;W.
G. T. Purcell, to the Bittern, 12, Sheerness.
Lieutenant Hoffmeis ter 's death has been reported as
having occurred on board the barque Chebar, nine
days after leaving Calcutta, on the 20th November,
1850.
We regret to state that Mr. James Honiball, well
known in the navy as the patentee of Porter's anchor.
died a few days since. Ile
was universally respected
for his honest worth and high integrity. He spent a
large fortune in introducing Porter's anchor into the
navy, and after years of toil and disappointment has
died just at the moment wben a fair trial of his anchor
has overcome official prejudice, and has established its
claim on the mercantile world.
After the launch of the screw-frigate Imperieuse on
Wednesday, the highly respected builder, Mr. Wil-
cox, entertained at his official residence the Surveyor
of the Navy and Lady Walker, Mr. Watts, the as-
sistant surveyor, Captain Warder, R.N., and others
who were present on the eccasion. As the Imperieuse
would arrive too late for the tide to be taken into the
basin at Woolwich on Wednesday afternoon, she was
towed to Woolwich yesterday.
The royal yacht tendor Elfin, Master-Commander
Balliston, went down to Cowes yesterday morning
to attend on Lady Barrin gton and the two princesses,
The Fairy returned into the harbour from Cowes.
PORTSMOUTH, THURMIA.Y. Commodore Talbot
hoisted the broad pendant in Meander, 44, again yes-
terday morning, and Rear Admiral Prescott and the
pay clerks proceeded off to her to pay her crew " ad-
vance. Her state room has received the necessary
alterations, and she will probably sail either on Sa-
turday or Sunday for the Cape to relieve the Castor,
Commodore Wyvill.
Medea, 6, steam-sloop, is under the shears at Ports-
mouth, being masted ; she will be prepared for com-
mission.

Powerful, 84, having undergone a thorough repair,
was taken out of dock at Portsmouth into the old
baoin yesterday. _ _

Stromboli, 6, steam-sloop, was taken out of Ports-
mouth Harbour on Wednesday, and tried along the
measured mile in Stoke's Bay, to test her engines and
machinery. She returned into harbour, and went
alongside the Maidstone, coal-depot.
Trident, iron-steamer, Lieut. Commander Harvey,
sailed from Spithead yesterday afternoon for the
South American station.

PLYMOUTH, THURSDAY.—Her Majesty's steam-
vessel Avon sailed with supernumeraries for Ports-
mouth on Monday, and returned yesterday.
The transport Diligence arrived from Portsmouth
on Monday, and sailed on Tuesday with stores for
Gibraltar.

The steam block-ship Hague, Captain Ramsay, will
be masted to-day.
The storesbip Cornwallis, having been masted on
Tuesday, was warped to the jetty to be rigged by the
riggers of the dockyard. She will be sent to Hong-
Kong to relieve the Minden.
The Cloud yacht, the property of the Earl of
Mount Edgecumbe, was taken into dock yesterday to
have her keel fitted.

The Chatham hulk, depOt to the artisans working
on the breakwater, having been repaired, was taken
out of dock on Monday, and towed by the steam-
vessel Confiance to her moorings in the Sound, in the
Admiralty anchorage ground.
Vesuvius, 6, steam-sloop, is receiving new copper
in the angle dock at Portsmouth.
The Trafalgar Indiaman sailed yesterday for Cal-
cutta. The Tudor, outward-bound, is hourly ex-
pected at Spithead.
The Gladiator, 6, steam-frigate, has been removed
from the steam basin to-day, and placed alongside the
Camperdown, 104, in readiness to enter the Neptune
dock, to be overhauled and refitted.
The Encounter, 14, screw steam-frigate, has bee❑
taken into the steam basin to-day, to have her defects
repaired. Her new commander, Capt. O'Callaghan,
hoisted the pendant to-day.
First Lieutenant Searle, of the Royal Marine
Artillery, embarks to-morrow on board her Majesty's
ship Dauntless, in the room of Lieut. Hewett, gone to
Hasler Hospital.
WOOLWICH, SEPT. 16.—The Agamemnon, 90, was
taken out of dock yesterday, and remains in the basin
for the convenience of the engineers and others at
work upon her.
The Imperieuse, 50, screw steam-frigate, was towed
down the river from Deptford to Woolwich to-day by
the Monkey and Zephyr steam-vessels, to have her
engines, of 350-horse power, by John Penn and Son,
fitted on board at this port.

ANNANDALE PEERAGE.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN.
Sin,—My attention has been called to an article in
your paper of the 7th instant, in which it is stated
ttat Mr. George Souter Johnston, now living, is son
of Lieutenant-General Johnston, and that the latter
was grandson of the first Earl of Hartfell (in your
paper called Hartfield).
That this is quite impossible, is sufficiently clear
(amongst other reasons) from the well-known fact,
that the four grandsons of the first Earl of Hartfell
were cotemporaries of Charles the Second.
I am concerned as solicitor for Mr. John Henry
Goodinge Johnstone, whose petition for the dignities
has been referred to the Committee of Privileges, and
will be brought on for hearing next Session, and I beg
the favour of your insertion of this letter in your
columns, as the article in your paper of the 7th
instant (with persons unacquainted with the facts)
might otherwise disparage my client's claim.
I am, Sir, yours very obedientlY, „„
.
EDWARD 17.1, 0 Virr-al
26, Great James-street, Bedford-row,
15th Sept., 1852.

EXTENSION OF STEAM UOMMITNICATION.--A new
line of screw steamers has been established between Liver-
pool. New York, and Chagres, at low rates of passage money
(first cabin 201., second cabin 151) The first vessel will sail
from Liverpool on the sth December
vessels next, and will be fol-
lowed in the first instance by other once month,
until the ships now in course of construction are completed,
when the service will be extended to twice a month. These
vessels after discharging cargoes at New York will proceed
to Chagres, and return to Liverpool vie( Havannah and Nei
The Hon. Captain Harris, brother to the Noble
Foreign Secretary, and late M.P. for Christchurch, has left
town to moon his consular duties Denmark,