HOW could anyone not warm to an author whose first book opens: ‘The following pages contain no more than they profess, namely, remarks upon Church Architecture, such as might be made by one who has taken more pleasure in a pursuit, and is willing to persuade his conscience that the hours he has given to his own gratification have not been altogether misemployed’?
John Louis Petit, born in 1801, was a member of a distinguished Huguenot family that included soldiers, vicars and philanthropists, but good marriages brought them greater prosperity through estates with reserves of coal and limestone. His grandfather was a
