7 FEBRUARY 1925, Page 11

The subject of the House of Lords War Memorial has

isuddenly come before the public in an acute form. The question is a domestic one for the Upper House and hardly affects the man in the street, but the general opinion will ;surely be that the statue of Queen Victoria, with its attendant allegorical figures, should be allowed to remain in the setting carefully designed for it by the mast competent brains of the time. The new Houses of Parliament were the great materiali- zation of the spirit of the period which under the inspiring leadership of the Prince Consort produced the Great Exhibi- tion. The artistic merits of the statue and the room should not enter into the question at all. Some of us may not like them now, but they may be considered the most beautiful thing in London in fifty years. At all events, let the statue and the room in which it stands remain a complete and un- altered monument of the taste of its period on historical grounds, on artistic grounds, and on the general grounds of piety and reverence for the great dead.