t the genuineness of a coin, without
ringing it. I felt also assured that this law must be universal if it
were conclusive; that it must enable us to reject all foolish and base
work, and to accept all noble and wise work, without reference to style
or national feeling; that it must sanction the design of all truly great
nations and times, Gothic or Greek or Arab; that it must cast off and
reprobate the design of all foolish nations and times, Chinese or
Mexican, or modern European: and that it must be easily applicable to
all possible architectural inventions of human mind. I set myself,
therefore, to establish such a law, in full belief that men are
intended, without excessive difficulty, and by use of their general
common sense, to know good things from bad; and that it is only because
they will not be at the pains required for the discernment, that the
world is so widely encumbered with forgeries and basenesses. I found the
work simpler than I had hoped; the reasonable things ranged themselves
in the order I required, and the foolish things fell aside, and took
themselves away so soon as they were looked in the face. I had then,
with respect to Venetian architecture, the choice, either to establish
each division of law in a separate form, as I came to the features with
which it was concerned, or else to ask the reader's patience, while I
followed out the general inquiry first, and determined with him a code
of right and wrong, to which we might together make retrospective
appeal. I thought this the best, though perhaps the dullest way; and in
these first following pages I have therefore endeavored to arrange those
foundations of criticism, on which I shall rest in my account of
Venetian architecture, in a form clear and simple enough to be
intelligible even to those who never thought of architecture before. To
those who have, much of what is stated in them will be well known or
self-evident; but they must not be indignant at a simplicity on which
the whole argument depends for its usefulness. From that which appears a
mere truism when first stated, they will find very singular consequences
sometimes following,--consequences altogether unexpected, and of
considerable importance; I will not pause here to dwell on their
importance, nor on that of the thing itself to be done; for I believe
most readers will at once admit the value of a criterion of right and
wrong in so practical and costly an art as architecture, and wil