r taste for art altogether, so that you can no longer
trust sculpture within their reach. Consider the innumerable forms of
evil involved in the temper and taste of the existing populace of London
or Paris, as compared with the temper of the populace of Florence, when
the quarter of Santa Maria Novella received its title of "Joyful
Quarter," from the rejoicings of the multitude at getting a new picture
into their church, better than the old ones;--all this difference being
exclusively chargeable on the Renaissance architecture. And then,
farther, if we remember, not only the revolutionary ravage of sacred
architecture, but the immeasurably greater destruction effected by the
Renaissance builders and their satellites, wherever they came,
destruction so wide-spread that there is not a town in France or Italy
but it has to deplore the deliberate overthrow of more than half its
noblest monuments, in order to put up Greek porticoes or palaces in
their stead; adding also all the blame of the ignorance of the meaner
kind of men, operating in thousands of miserable abuses upon the
frescoes, books, and pictures, as the architects' hammers did on the
carved work, of the Middle Ages;[26] and, finally, if we examine the
influence which the luxury, and, still more, the heathenism, joined with
the essential dullness of these schools, have had on the upper class of
society, it will ultimately be found that no expressions are energetic
enough to describe, nor broad enough to embrace, the enormous moral
evils which have risen from them.

[Footnote 26: Nothing appears to me much more wonderful, than the
remorseless way in which the educated ignorance, even of the present
day, will sweep away an ancient monument, if its preservation be not
absolutely consistent with immediate convenience or economy. Putting
aside all antiquarian considerations, and all artistical ones, I wish
that people would only consider the steps and the weight of the
following very simple argument. You allow it is wrong to waste time,
that is, your own time; but then it must be still more wrong to waste
other people's; for you have some right to your own time, but none to
theirs. Well, then, if it is thus wrong to waste the time of the living,
it must be still more wrong to waste the time of the dead; for the
living can redeem their time, the dead cannot. But you waste the best of
the time of the dead when you destroy the works they have left you; for
to those works