grow
according to the received Attic architectural rules of right? I will try
you. Here is a cluster of ash leaves, which I have grown expressly for
you on Greek principles (_fig._ 6, Plate III.) How do you like it?

[Footnote 4: Sometimes of six; that is to say, they spring in pairs;
only the two uppermost pairs, sometimes the three uppermost, spring so
close together as to appear one cluster.]

9. Observe, I have played you no trick in this comparison. It is
perfectly fair in all respects. I have merely substituted for the
beautiful spring of the Gothic vaulting in the ash bough, a cross
lintel; and then, in order to raise the leaves to the same height, I
introduce vertical columns; and I make the leaves square-headed instead
of pointed, and their lateral ribs at right angles with the central rib,
instead of sloping from it. I have, indeed, only given you two boughs
instead of four; because the perspective of the crossing ones could not
have been given without confusing the figure; but I imagine you have
quite enough of them as it is.

"Nay, but," some of you instantly answer, "if we had been as long
accustomed to square-leaved ash trees as we have been to sharp-leaved
ash trees, we should like them just as well." Do not think it. Are you
not much more accustomed to gray whinstone and brown sandstone than you
are to rubies or emeralds? and yet will you tell me you think them as
beautiful? Are you not more accustomed to the ordinary voices of men
than to the perfect accents of sweet singing? yet do you not instantly
declare the song to be loveliest? Examine well the channels of your
admiration, and you will find that they are, in verity, as unchangeable
as the channels of your heart's blood; that just as by the pressure of a
bandage, or by unwholesome and perpetual action of some part of the
body, that blood may be wasted or arrested, and in its stagnancy cease
to nourish the frame, or in its disturbed flow affect it with incurable
disease, so also admiration itself may, by the bandages of fashion,
bound close over the eyes and the arteries of the soul, be arrested in
its natural pulse and healthy flow; but that wherever the artificial
pressure is removed, it will return into that bed which has been traced
for it by the finger of God.

10. Consider this subject well, and you will find that custom has indeed
no real influence upon our feelings of the beautiful, except in dulling
and checking them; that is to say, i