Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Cinque Ports: A Historical and Descriptive Record
For the same reason I have unstintedly abused the mutilators of the public buildings, sacred and secular, that remain within the Liberties. Nothing, it seems to me, is so absolutely essential to the cure of certain mental maladies fostered by the spirit of the age as the sight of the good work they did in the old days before our times; nothing so curative as the sight of the good craftsmanship; nothing so essential for the preserva tion of the old faith as the being for a little time within the walls that that faith caused to rise. Yet within these last few years every one of these buildings has been bescrubbed and transformed to suit the ideals of the modern housemaid. It is almost impossible to distinguish any one of them from the products of the years we live in, years sad for the craftsman, sadder for the artist, sadder still for the upholder of any faith whatsoever. There is not, I think, within the Liberties of the Ports one single church that has not been thus restored. It is lamentable, it is pitiful, to think that a century that some one has bitterly nicknamed the wonderful should have left nothing unspoilt of so much that humbler centuries had left of the beautiful, of the reverend; to think that we must go down to all time - in swcu/u sweulorum - as a people who worshipped in temples of plaster of Paris and of pitch-pine; to think that where we found the real thing, we inevitably, inexorably, replaced it by a makeshift, by a cheap imitation of the real thing that we found.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
