GWILT, Joseph (1784-1863), author of the Encyclopaedia of Architecture, was the younger son of George Gwilt, architect surveyor to the county of Surrey, and was born at Southwark, January 11, 1784. He was educated at St Paul’s school, and after a short course of instruction in his father’s office was in 1801 admitted a student of the Royal Acιdemy, where in the same year he gained the silver medal for his drawing of the tower and steeple of St Dunstan-in-the-East. In 1811 he published a Treatise on the Equilibrium of Arches, and in 1815 he was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. After a visit to Italy in 1816, he published in 1818 Notitia Architectonica Italiana, or Concise Notices of the Buildings and Architects of Italy. In 1825 he published, with notes and valuable additions, an edition of Sir William Chambers’s Treatise on Civil Architecture·, and among his principal other contributions to the literature of his profession are a translation of the Architecture of Vitruvius (1826), a Treatise on the Rudiments of Architecture, Practical and Theoretical (1826), and his valuable Encyclopaedia ofArchitecture (1842), which has passed through a great many editions, and was published with additions by Wyatt Papworth in 1867. In recognition of Guilt’s advocacy of the importance to architects of a knowledge of mathematics, he was in 1833 elected a member of the Royal Astronomical Society. In addition to the sciences bearing on his profession he took a special interest in philology and music, and is the author of Rudiments of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue (1829), and of the article “Music” in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana. His works as a practical architect are not of much importance, the principal being Markree Castle near Sligo in Ireland, and ...