The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1911. TATTERSHALL CASTLE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 73, 9 November 1911, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1911. TATTERSHALL CASTLE.

A cable message received yesterday announced that Lord Curzon has bought Tattershall Castle, one of England’s historic homes, which it was stated had been purchased by a wealthy American to be shifted to the United States. How this latter project was resented in England will be gathered from, an article appearing in the “Manchester Guardian” of September 22nd, in which the writer says:—Apparently the attempt to keep Tattershall Castle standing and accessible is to be balked ,by the freak of a rich American, who wants and has the power to pull it down, ship the bricks to America, and put them together again. Of course this will not give him Tattersall Castle. Even more than most things an ancient building is what the philosophers call a system of relations. Its relations to its site, to its surroundings, to local history and association, to the quarry or claypit whence it was digged, and to the climate which weathered its walls to the tone that wo know—all these relations make up so groat a part of its being that though you may kill it you cannot export it. All you can ship away is its ghost. Old Temple Bar cast away in a brewer’s park no further off than Hertfordshire was only a pitiful spectre of its great self arching the tides of ’buses in the Strand. The killing of Tattershall Castle seems to have begun some time ago and to have been carried out with pretty robust savagery, the famous fifteenthcentury mantelpieces, or some of them, having been hacked out of their places, as the Gravedigger says in “Hamlet,” “as though they had never been such.” The murder will soon bo complete, and neither we nor America will have Tattershall Castle. The one true way of consolation for such losses is to reflect that what will make or mar us in architecture, as in any other art, is not the line tilings that we treasure, so much as tbo lino things that wo make. It is much less serious that some rich American ignoramus is going to deport the ruins of Tattersall than that some American architects are building banks and public libraries to which we should be bard put to it to show English equals of the same date. Wo are sometimes apt to forget that fine buildings arc naturally mortal and that provision for their birth is much more important than sustenance in their extreme old ago. Perhaps we do not In our duty by the veterans as well as we should, but if there were even as much popular interest in the living architecture of the day as there is in almost anything that is ivied and crumbles, bow much less dull would many people find it to walk about in city streets.” MERELY A PRETENDER Wellington’s spluttering “Dominion” recently took the Wellington “Evening Dost” to task for “meting out a mixture of praise and blame alternately to each of the principal political parties.” Replying to tins the “Post” says that the “Dominion’s” one object is to discredit the Government;

to adversely criticise the Opposition is, in its eyes, an offence. But the “Post” emphatically maintains its right to be discriminating in praising or blaming either side, whether Government or Opposition, an.!, as i matter of fairness, it must resent the attempts made by its contemporary to misrepresent its attitude. The “Post” concludes: “It is an easy matter to misrepresent the meaning of the word ‘independence,’ and tlie methods i:o----quently adopted arc questionable, to say the least of it. One difference between the ‘Post’ and the ‘Dominion’ a difference which people not swayed by party passion understand—is that the ‘Post’' is independent and makes no pretence at biased partisanship, while the ‘Dominion’ is-palpably partisan and makes a pretence at independence.”