With love to sara, who will doubtless brain me.

[commodorified]

Whatever may be said in favour of the Victorians, it is pretty generally admitted that few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.
Summer Moonshine (1938)

(WRT the architecture-commissioning classes of that and earlier eras I myself have speculated more than once that topiary is *the* unmistakable sign of a people much afflicted with spiritual inbreeding, alcoholism and tertiary syphillis, sometimes all at once, but this does not exclude the possibility of Gothic Revival being in the same symptom cluster... )

Via some fabulous person on my friendslist (curse this reading on the phone; no good will come of it), the
Random Wodehouse Generator

Comments

[legionseagle]

There has been speculation to the effect that Pugin for one probably did have tertiary syphilis.

Mind you, my mother when confronted with that great triumph of Gothic excess, Keble College Oxford (there was at that point an anti-Keble society, whose members were supposed to bring a brick to every meeting and CND posters bearing the slogan "What would a one-megaton nuclear bomb do to Oxford?" were regularly annotated "Destroy Keble, if we're lucky") said, thoughtfully, that she thought Oxford needed one, because it had one of all the other styles.