rovince.

[167] This cathedral, destroyed in 1799, was one of the most
beautiful in all Normandy.

[168] Dante.

THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE

It has been my endeavour to show in the preceding pages how every form
of noble architecture is in some sort the embodiment of the Polity,
Life, History, and Religious Faith of nations. Once or twice in doing
this, I have named a principle to which I would now assign a definite
place among those which direct that embodiment; the last place, not
only as that to which its own humility would incline, but rather as
belonging to it in the aspect of the crowning grace of all the rest;
that principle, I mean, to which Polity owes its stability, Life its
happiness, Faith its acceptance, Creation its continuance,--Obedience.

Nor is it the least among the sources of more serious satisfaction
which I have found in the pursuit of a subject that at first appeared
to bear but slightly on the grave interests of mankind, that the
conditions of material perfection which it leads me in conclusion to
consider, furnish a strange proof how false is the conception, how
frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call
Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest
ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but
its being, was impossible. There is no such thing in the universe.
There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the
sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only
for our heaviest punishment.

In one of the noblest poems[169] for its imagery and its music belonging
to the recent school of our literature, the writer has sought in the
aspect of inanimate nature the expression of that Liberty which, having
once loved, he had seen among men in its true dyes of darkness. But
with what strange fallacy of interpretation! since in one noble line of
his invocation he has contradicted the assumptions of the rest, and
acknowledged the presence of a subjection, surely not less severe
because eternal. How could he otherwise? since if there be any one
principle more widely than another confessed by every utterance, or
more sternly than another imprinted on every atom, of the visible
creation, that principle is not Liberty, but Law.

The enthusiast would reply that by Liberty he meant the Law of Liberty.
Then why use the single and misunderstood word? If by liberty you mean
chastisement of the