nglish piety;
but that in the one case I was speaking of the spirit manifested in the
entire architecture of the nation, and in the other of occasional
efforts of superstition as distinguished from that spirit; and, farther,
that in the one case, I was speaking of decorative features, which are
ordinarily the results of feelings, in the other of structural features,
which are ordinarily the results of necessity or convenience. Thus it is
rational and just that we should attribute the decoration of the arches
of St. Mark's with scriptural mosaics to a religious sentiment; but it
would be a strange absurdity to regard as an effort of piety the
invention of the form of the arch itself, of which one of the earliest
and most perfect instances is in the Cloaca Maxima. And thus in the case
of spires and towers, it is just to ascribe to the devotion of their
designers that dignity which was bestowed upon forms derived from the
simplest domestic buildings; but it is ridiculous to attribute any great
refinement of religious feeling, or height of religious aspiration, to
those who furnished the funds for the erection of the loveliest tower in
North France, by paying for permission to eat butter in Lent.]

23. For instance, you know that, for an immense time back, all your
public buildings have been built with a row of pillars supporting a
triangular thing called a pediment. You see this form every day in your
banks and clubhouses, and churches and chapels; you are told that it is
the perfection of architectural beauty; and yet suppose Sir Walter
Scott, instead of writing, "Each purple peak, each flinty spire," had
written, "Each purple peak, each flinty 'pediment.'"[12] Would you have
thought the poem improved? And if not, why would it be spoiled? Simply
because the idea is no longer of any value to you; the thing spoken of
is a nonentity. These pediments, and stylobates, and architraves never
excited a single pleasurable feeling in you--never will, to the end of
time. They are evermore dead, lifeless, and useless, in art as in
poetry, and though you built as many of them as there are slates on your
house-roofs, you will never care for them. They will only remain to
later ages as monuments of the patience and pliability with which the
people of the nineteenth century sacrificed their feelings to fashions,
and their intellects to forms. But on the other hand, that strange and
thrilling interest with which such words strike you as ar