Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

within Milner’s position’. 51 Her suggestion is that he could not argue purely on aesthetic
grounds because: ‘For [him] art could not and did not exist for its own sake. The true
value of Salisbury lay in its historical and religious significance.’ 52 But for Milner and his
fellow antiquaries, as the Burkean Sublime became infused with the romantic
Picturesque, quite specific and subjective associational values were intrinsic to aesthetic
pleasure. That these associations might be spiritual and religious was a new idea, but one
that later in the nineteenth century, in the writings of A W N Pugin (1812-1852), directly
inspired by Milner, and in the development of ecclesiology would become widely
accepted and influential.
Throughout Milner’s treatise scholarship and historical fact are drawn into a
reciprocal relationship with aesthetic experience. Discussing the opening of graves, the
removal of bodies, including those of Bishop Poore and St Osmund, and the cutting up of
gravestones Milner was concerned to appeal to his readers’ sensibilities as much as to
Canon Law and indeed invoked both in the space of a few pages. Having set out the legal
objections to such interference and listed the graves he passes on to Gray’s Elegy with its
conception of the duty that the living owe to the dead, a conception that is, for a Catholic
priest, strikingly unorthodox.
Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries:
Ev’n midst our ashes live our wonted fires 53
Milner’s experience of the architecture of Salisbury is essentially different from that of
Wyatt and Barrington because, he argues, he has better taste, which derives from better
understanding. He points out that the ‘brassless slabs’ cut up for paving stones because
there was nothing legible written on them, were in fact comprehensible to those who
knew how to read them.
51
Buchanan, ‘“Wyatt the Destroyer”: a vandal at Salisbury Cathedral?’, p.131.
52
Buchanan, ‘“Wyatt the Destroyer”: a vandal at Salisbury Cathedral?, p.131.
53
Milner, A Dissertation on the Modern Style of altering Antient Cathedrals, p.31.
49