ng a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the
same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas, never
enters our minds for a moment. And for good reason;--There is indeed
rhythm in the verses, quite as strict as the symmetries or rhythm of
the architecture, and a thousand times more beautiful, but there is
something else than rhythm. The verses were neither made to order, nor
to match, as the capitals were; and we have therefore a kind of
pleasure in them other than a sense of propriety. But it requires a
strong effort of common sense to shake ourselves quit of all that we
have been taught for the last two centuries, and wake to the perception
of a truth just as simple and certain as it is new: that great art,
whether expressing itself in words, colours, or stones, does _not_ say
the same thing over and over again; that the merit of architectural, as
of every other art, consists in its saying new and different things;
that to repeat itself is no more a characteristic of genius in marble
than it is of genius in print; and that we may, without offending any
laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist,
that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.

Yet all this is true, and self-evident; only hidden from us, as many
other self-evident things are, by false teaching. Nothing is a great
work of art, for the production of which either rules or models can be
given. Exactly so far as architecture works on known rules, and from
given models, it is not an art, but a manufacture; and it is, of the
two procedures, rather less rational (because more easy) to copy
capitals or mouldings from Phidias, and call ourselves architects, than
to copy heads and hands from Titian, and call ourselves painters.

Let us then understand at once that change or variety is as much a
necessity to the human heart and brain in buildings as in books; that
there is no merit, though there is some occasional use, in monotony;
and that we must no more expect to derive either pleasure or profit
from an architecture whose ornaments are of one pattern, and whose
pillars are of one proportion, than we should out of a universe in
which the clouds were all of one shape, and the trees all of one size.

And this we confess in deeds, though not in words. All the pleasure
which the people of the nineteenth century take in art, is in pictures,
sculpture, minor objects of virtu, or mediaeval architecture, whi