demned the Greek fret, as we have seen, because it is composed of straight lines, which scarcely ever occur in nature, the only natural object in which a prototype of it occurs being crystals of bismuth formed by slow cooling. But there occurs also in Lombard architecture, an ornament composed of straight lines, namely, squares placed diagonally within squares on the face of the wall. How is this to be defended? The first defence is, that its terminal contour is the very image of a carefully prepared artificial crystal of common salt, and that salt is a substance considerably more familiar to us than bismuth. And then, it is further urged that the forms which it exhibits are among the very first and commonest of crystalline forms. Considering how unfamiliar men in general are with crystalline forms, either natural or artificial, how little they attend to those minute phenomena, even if they have the opportunity, which rarely occurs to most, we can hardly see what the ornaments here described would gain by being allowed to be imitations of such natural objects as those referred to. Is it at all likely that either the Greek or the Italian architects ever saw 'crystals of bismuth formed by the unagitated cooling of the melted metal,' or 'carefully prepared artificial crystals of common salt; or that if they did, they had any recollection of them when they devised the ornaments in which this resemblance is supposed to exist?

Mr. Ruskin has taken a great number of his examples of architectural excellence of all kinds from Italian edifices, and evidently looks upon those works with a tone of unmingled admiration, in which we believe that he will not be quite at one with those among us whose architectural views have been systematically formed by a comprehensive study of English, French, and German medieval architecture. Such persons have always, on turning their attention to Italian buildings, found something incomplete (as to style), and inconsistent in their scheme. The transalpine Gothic, a complete and consummate system in its own region, never obtained a thorough victory in Italy. We have never more than a struggle, in which the old Classical

architecture and the new Teutonic, each shows its influence; each modifies the other, but neither is fully developed. This is, we conceive, the general judgment of the best architectural critics. But though the mediæval Italian has no complete style, it has many manners, and upon these Mr. Ruskin dwells with great delight. In the Lamp of Obedience, which is, as we have said, a declaration that our architects can never excel till they subdue their caprice, and submit themselves to a style established by common consent, he tells us that this principle being accepted, the choice would lie between four styles:-1. The Pisan Romanesque; 2. The early Gothic of the Western Italian Republic, advanced as far and as fast as our art would enable us to the Gothic of Giotto; 3. The Venetian art in its purest developement; 4. The English earliest decorated.' He allows that the most natural, and, perhaps, the safest choice, would be of the last; but probably few other English architectural critics, supposing they had to establish a style for England by a supreme authority, would think that the choice lay between one English and three Italian styles.

In the same spirit he looks upon the Doge's palace at Venice as the most beautiful of buildings, except one; the one being the Campanile of Giotto at Florence; a building of which, in the minds of most persons, the last judgment would probably be that which Mr. Ruskin allows is the first (p. 134). In its first appeal to the stranger's eye there is something unpleasing-a mingling, as it seems to him, of over-severity with overminuteness.' There is, in fact, in this tower, a want of organic structure; neither the horizontal nor the vertical lines predominating, and the square portions into which it is thus divided being marked in both directions by fine and multiplied elements, so as to produce the general effect of an elegant piece of furniture rather than of an edifice.

Mr. Ruskin, as we have already intimated, does not look with a favourable eye upon our later English Gothic. The Tudor, he says, is contemptible; far below the French Flamboyant. Perhaps our Cambridge readers, and those who have

visited Cambridge, will be disposed to allege King's College Chapel as an evidence that the edifices of the Tudors are not all contemptible. Alas! they do not know the iron consistency and pitiless severity of Mr. Ruskin's criticism. That chapel, admired and celebrated as it is, must go with the rest of its race. Whereever it is brought forward in this work, it is mentioned only to be condemned. "What is its outside ?' (c. iv. art. 26) Mr. Ruskin exclaims, indignantly and sorrowfully.

How many buildings have we in England like King's College Chapel in Cambridge, looking like tables upside down, with their four legs in the air? What, it will be said, have not beasts four legs? Yes, but legs of different shapes, with a head between them. So they have a pair of ears, and perhaps a pair of horns; but not at both ends. Knock down a couple of pinnacles at either end in King's College Chapel, and you will have a kind of proportion instantly.

It is extremely curious to see that Mr. Ruskin thinks that a building may be beautiful which looks like a dog or a cow with its legs in the air, but not if it looks like a table in an analogous attitude. Granting the truth and the importance of Mr. Ruskin's doctrine, that in a cathedral you should have one tower in the centre and two at the west end, or two at one end simply, does this prove a college chapel to be ugly which has four equal turrets? Ought a chapel necessarily to have a high spire or tower? And are the 'host of ugly churches in England, with pinnacles at the corners and none in the middle,' really all ugly? For instance, the towers of Magdalen College at Oxford, of Gloucester and of Canterbury cathedrals? Has not

this form of structure, a square mass with four flanking turrets, a meaning derived from an ancient castleform (from which also the battlements are derived)? and is not this derivation, softened down to an ecclesiastical aspect, as reasonable a ground of propriety as a resemblance to any animal whatever, erect or inverted?

We quit with regret the many interesting questions which Mr. Ruskin brings before us in this chapter on Beauty, and the remarks, always eloquent and striking, often in the highest degree instructive, which he

applies to many kinds of ornament. We cannot pretend, within our limits, to go through the book; but there are some points relative to the Lamp of Truth which we would not leave unnoticed, and to which we may conveniently pass while speaking of King's College Chapel.

Mr. Ruskin objects to the interior of this building on the ground of its violating Truth as well as Beauty. His principle of Truth is, as we have already said, that a building should seem to be what it is, in the manner of supports, as well as in other respects. And it is for its violation of this precept, apparently, that he condemns the building in question. He says (c. iv. art. 7) :

The moment that the conditions of weight are comprehended, both truth and feeling require that the conditions of support should be also comprehended. Nothing can be worse, either as judged by the taste or conscience, than affectedly inadequate supports-suspensions in the air, and other such tricks and vanities.

King's College Chapel, Cambridge, is a piece of architectural juggling, if possible, still more to be condemned [than Santa Sophia], because less sublime.

Now King's College Chapel has not pendants like Henry the Seventh's Chapel, and therefore we are somewhat at a loss to know to what special feature this censure refers. The affectedly inadequate supports seem to point out the vaulting shafts as too slender. But the vaulting shafts are, as is common in such architecture, merely a group of vertical mouldings on the wall; and the wall itself, and not these vertical shafts only, is, and is conceived to be, the support of the roof. In all stone-vaulted churches the shafts are, and are conceived to be, cut upon the wall; and there is no delusion attempted as to the support of the roof by the vaulting shafts alone without the walls, even in Early English work; still less in Decorated work, in which the detached shafts vanish; and less still in Perpendicular work, in which all the solid parts are, and are conceived as being, framework, not any mouldings upon them alone. These solid parts are made up of mouldings, shafts, and the like; but they are made up of

such elements by courses of masonry, which courses are not concealed, and which ought not to be concealed, as Mr. Ruskin himself very justly observes (Lamp of Power, art. 11). The mind receives a peculiar kind of pleasure from seeing the possibility of regarding a building at the same time as frame-work and as wallwork. As it has recently been said, and, as we hold, rightly said, the two ideas, that of frame-work and that of wall-work, are both present to the mind; and their combined concords and discords produce that kind of harmony in which architecture especially delights. Now, considered in this point of view, the vaulting of King's College Chapel is absolutely as simple and normal as possible; so far from any 'juggling,' the effect is produced by the most direct means, and the means are fairly shown. The main peculiarity is, that the whole structure, walls and buttresses, is employed in supporting the vault, and that all which is not so employed is opened as window.

But though we think Mr. Ruskin, in this instance, makes a one-sided application of the principle of structural truth in architecture, we quite agree with him as to the importance of the principle itself; and we could with great pleasure follow many of the trains of thought by which he has so well illustrated this principle. We cannot, indeed, assent to his doctrine (adopted apparently out of his love for Italian art), that tracery produces its finest effects when the attention is bestowed, not upon the tracery-bars (as Mr. Willis has well termed them), but upon the spaces of various shape which they circumscribe; not upon the frames, but upon the lights-or darks, as they are when seen from the outside. For this view overlooks the very essence of tracery, which is, to consist of a series of frames, each subordinate to the one above; accompanying its course in the large divisions, and branching from it to form the small divisions. It is essential that this frame-work should be present to the eye as frame-work, not merely as a pierced wall or plate, which is the Italian idea. But when this tracery was no longer regarded as frame-work, but as a series of flexi

ble lines-and when the flow of these lines became a subject followed out in a fanciful and capricious manner, as a direct exercise of skill, the like display of skill being also exhibited in other features, and especially in the interpretations of shafts;-then, we agree with Mr. Ruskin, Gothic architecture had visibly passed its point of greatest completeness, and thenceforth verges to its decline. We will allow ourselves and our readers the gratification of quoting Mr. Ruskin's eloquent funeral oration over the grave of the Complete Gothic :-

So fell the great dynasty of mediæval architecture. It was because it had lost its own strength, and disobeyed its own laws-because its order, and consistency,

From

and organization, had been broken through that it could oppose no resistance to the rush of overwhelming innovation. And this, observe, all because it had sacrificed a single truth. that one surrender of its integrity, from that one endeavour to assume the semblance of what it was not, arose the multitudinous forms of disease and decrepitude, which rotted away the pillars of its supremacy. It was not because its time was come; it was not because it was scorned by the classical Romanist, or dreaded by the faithful Protestant. That scorn and that fear it might have survived, and lived; it would have stood forth in stern comparison with the enervated sensuality of the renaissance; it would have risen in renewed and purified honour, and with a new soul, from the ashes into which it sank, giving up its glory, as it had received it, for the honour of God-but its own truth was gone, and it sank for ever. There was no wisdom nor strength left in it, to raise it from the dust; and the error of zeal, and the softness of luxury, smote it down and dissolved it away. It is good for us to remember this, as we tread upon the bare ground of its foundations, and stumble over its scattered stones. Those rent skeletons of pierced wall, through which our sea-winds moan and murmur, strewing them joint by joint, and bone by bone, along the bleak promontories on which the Pharos lights came once from houses of prayer-those grey arches and quiet aisles under which the sheep of our valleys feed and rest on the turf that has buried their altars-those shapeless heaps, that are not of the Earth, which lift our fields into strange and sudden banks of flowers, and stay our mountain streams with stones that are not their own, have other thoughts to ask from us than those of mourning for the rage that despoiled,

or the fear that forsook them. It was not the robber, not the fanatic, not the blasphemer, who sealed the destruction that they had wrought; the war, the wrath, the terror, might have worked their worst, and the strong walls would have risen, and the slight pillars would have started again, from under the hand of the destroyer. But they could not rise out of the ruins of their own violated truth.

We have said that Mr. Ruskin, in treating of the 'Lamp of Memory,' gives us a Theory of the Picturesque ; meaning thereby a theory in the sense in which we have so often had theories of the beautiful and of the sublime, and the like: in short, an answer to the question, What is the Picturesque? After rejecting some answers given by other persons, Mr. Ruskin gives us his own; which at first, indeed, sounds somewhat oracular, but which is unfolded and worked out with remarkable ingenuity of thought and delicacy of taste. Picturesqueness, he says, is parasitical sublimity. This dark saying becomes somewhat more luminous when we discern that sublimity implies breadth of shadow, boldness and largeness of outline, and the like; and that by designating this sublimity as parasitical, it is meant that it is found in the accessory, not in the essential parts of the work. Thus, to use Mr. Ruskin's own examples (c. vi. art. 13), in Francia or Angelico, the shadows on the human face are employed only to make the contours of the face thoroughly felt, and the attention is directed to these essential characters; but by Rembrandt, Salvator, or Caravaggio, the features are used for the sake of the shadows, and the power of the painter is employed upon these. The latter painters are thus picturesque. So again in the sculptures of the Parthenon, the shadow is of use only as showing the figures; but in Gothic sculpture the shadow is arranged in masses for its own sake. So again if the hair be subordinate to the countenance, it may be beautiful; but if it be formed into bold and shadowy projections, so as to draw attention on its own account, it is picturesque. Animals, presented as in good condition, with reference to their characteristic powers, their muscular forms and motions, as the horse, may be beautiful,

even in historical composition; but 'exactly in proportion as their character of sublimity passes into excrescences-into mane and beard as in the lion, into horns as in the stag, into shaggy hide as in the ass colt, into variegation as the zebra, or into plumage-they become picturesque.' It is remarkable how near Mr. Ruskin comes to the illustration of this point, which was furnished by the satirical liveliness of Sydney Smith, when, lecturing upon this subject, he wound up his general description of the contrast by saying, In short, the rector's horse is beautiful, the curate's is picturesque.' Mr. Ruskin's application of this to architecture is no less ingenious. The ivy is to the ruined building as the hair to the human countenance. And he adds this remark (p. 175), that those styles of architecture which are picturesque in the sense thus explained-that is, whose decoration depends on points of shadow rather than purity of outline (as the French Gothic; but why French' especially ?), do not suffer, but commonly gain in effect, when their details are partly worn away.

It must be evident to our readers, by the specimens which we have quoted, how rich in refined criticism and glowing eloquence is the work now under our notice. We may add, that it is illustrated by a number of plates, which are picturesque, so far as broad and strong shades can make them so. But we cannot approve of the mode in which Mr. Ruskin has not only collected, but connected together, as if they were parts of one structure, features belonging to the most disparate and distant edifices; for instance, beneath the shade of an Italian window-head brought from Verona is a French Gothic arcade from Bayeux, and a star-shaped disk from Padua (PI.IV.) Again, traceries from Caen, Bayeux, Rouen, and Beauvais are not only grouped together, but so grouped that they present to us three tiers of windows, the two upper tiers being separated by a line making an angle of forty-five degrees, so that the windows in the upper tier gradually diminish to the left, and those in the next tier to the right,-a most strange and unarchitectural phenomenon, which, as it has no meaning, had

better have never offered itself to the eye.

But it is an ungracious task to blame where there is so much to enjoy. And even the author's disposition to think meanly of our English works, which we have already noticed, may not be without its use, if it stir up all of us, employers, architects, and critics of architecture, to nobler designs, and a nobler spirit of carrying design into execution. We shall not fear, therefore, to conclude with a quotation which has something of a Juvenalian severity in its lofty tone :—

But I know not how it is, unless that our English hearts have more oak than stone in them, and have more filial sympathy with acorns than Alps; but all that we do is small and mean, if not worse-thin, and wasted, and unsubstantial. It is not modern work only; we have built like frogs and mice since the thirteenth century (except only in our castles). What a contrast between the pitiful little pigeon-holes which stand for doors in the east [west] front of Salisbury, looking like the entrances to a beehive or a wasp's nest, and the soaring arches and kingly crowning of the gates of Abbeville, Rouen, and Rheims, or the rockhewn piers of Chartres, or the dark and vaulted porches and writhed pillars of Verona! Of domestic architecture what need is there to speak? How small, how cramped, how poor, how miserable in its petty neatness is our best! how beneath the mark of attack, and the level of contempt, that which is common with us! What a strange sense of formalized deformity, of shrivelled precision,

of starved accuracy, of minute misanthropy have we, as we leave even the rude streets of Picardy for the markettowns of Kent! Until that street architecture of ours is bettered, until we give it some size and boldness, until we give our windows recess and our walls thickness, I know not how we can blame our architects for their feebleness in more important work; their eyes are inured to narrowness and slightness: can we expect them at a word to conceive and deal with breadth and solidity? They ought not to live in our cities; there is that in their miserable walls which bricks up to death men's imaginations, as surely as ever perished forsworn nun. An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what Nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome. There was something in the old power of architecture, which it had from the recluse more than from the citizen. buildings of which I have spoken with chief praise rose, indeed, out of the war of the piazza, and above the fury of the populace and Heaven forbid that for such cause we should ever have to lay a larger stone, or rivet a firmer bar, in our England! But we have other sources of power, in the imagery of our iron coasts and azure hills; of power more pure, nor less serene, than that of the hermit spirit which once lighted with white lines of cloisters the glades of the Alpine pine, and raised into ordered spires the wild rocks of the Norman sea; which gave to the temple gate the depth and darkness of Elijah's Horeb cave; and lifted, out of the populous city, grey cliffs of lonely stone, into the midst of sailing birds and silent air.

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