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

the hospital of St Cross, a humble member of that same community of architecture,
imbued with the metaphysical power of the Gothic.
Figure 11 St Peter's Chapel, Winchester, interior
As for the building itself it fell short, inevitably, of Milner’s ambitions. Kenneth
Clark, having quoted Milner’s description of it, to illustrate his ‘enthusiasm’, a word
Clark never used with unreserved approval, went on to add that ‘unfortunately St Peter’s
chapel still stands’. 73 It is now much altered but as Milner Hall the shell survives and we
may consider this fortunate for while the building, like the views of it published in
Milner’s lifetime [fig:11], confirm that it was small and what a later generation would
consider flimsy and even vulgar in its imagery, the very distance it displays from
Milner’s vision serves to underline how intense that vision was for the late Georgians.
Keats, at the consecration of the Gothic chapel at Stansted in Sussex in 1819, another
building composed in part of older fragments, conceived, from looking at the antique
armorial glass in the nave windows, the ‘dim emblazonings’ of St Agnes’s Eve. By 1965
the effect of the chapel on Ian Nairn, writing the Sussex volume of the Buildings of
England was very much what Wyatt’s Salisbury had been on Milner. He was prepared to
find the chapel ‘delightful’ and ‘pretty’ but saw its Gothic as ‘purest fantasy’. 74 No later
generation will experience what Keats and Milner did, but half a century after Nairn the
qualities of Georgian Gothic may be more sympathetically understood.
73
Clark, The Gothic Revival, p.103.
74
Nairn and Pevsner, The Buildings of England, Sussex, p.335.
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