angles of the turreted chamber, the Renaissance builder spared such cost
and toil in his detail, that he might spend it in bringing larger stones
from a distance; and restricted himself to rustication and five orders,
that he might load the ground with colossal piers, and raise an
ambitious barrenness of architecture, as inanimate as it was gigantic,
above the feasts and follies of the powerful or the rich. The Titanic
insanity extended itself also into ecclesiastical design: the principal
church in Italy was built with little idea of any other admirableness
than that which was to result from its being huge; and the religious
impressions of those who enter it are to this day supposed to be
dependent, in a great degree, on their discovering that they cannot span
the thumbs of the statues which sustain the vessels for holy water.

Sec. XLV. It is easy to understand how an architecture which thus appealed
not less to the lowest instincts of dulness than to the subtlest pride
of learning, rapidly found acceptance with a large body of mankind; and
how the spacious pomp of the new manner of design came to be eagerly
adopted by the luxurious aristocracies, not only of Venice, but of the
other countries of Christendom, now gradually gathering themselves into
that insolent and festering isolation, against which the cry of the poor
sounded hourly in more ominous unison, bursting at last into thunder
(mark where,--first among the planted walks and plashing fountains of
the palace wherein the Renaissance luxury attained its utmost height in
Europe, Versailles); that cry, mingling so much piteousness with its
wrath and indignation, "Our soul is filled with the scornful reproof of
the wealthy, and with the despitefulness of the proud."

Sec. XLVI. But of all the evidence bearing upon this subject presented by
the various arts of the fifteenth century, none is so interesting or so
conclusive as that deduced from its tombs. For, exactly in proportion as
the pride of life became more insolent, the fear of death became more
servile; and the difference in the manner in which the men of early and
later days adorned the sepulchre, confesses a still greater difference
in their manner of regarding death. To those he came as the comforter
and the friend, rest in his right hand, hope in his left; to these as
the humiliator, the spoiler, and the avenger. And, therefore, we find
the early tombs at once simple and lovely in adornment, severe and