serving which we can become Titians. It is possible so to
measure and administer syllables, as to construct harmonious verse; but
there are no laws by which we can write Iliads. Out of the poem or the
picture, once produced, men may elicit laws by the volume, and study
them with advantage, to the better understanding of the existing poem or
picture; but no more write or paint another, than by discovering laws of
vegetation they can make a tree to grow. And therefore, wheresoever we
find the system and formality of rules much dwelt upon, and spoken of as
anything else than a help for children, there we may be sure that noble
art is not even understood, far less reached. And thus it was with all
the common and public mind in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The
greater men, indeed, broke through the thorn hedges; and, though much
time was lost by the learned among them in writing Latin verses and
anagrams, and arranging the framework of quaint sonnets and dexterous
syllogisms, still they tore their way through the sapless thicket by
force of intellect or of piety; for it was not possible that, either in
literature or in painting, rules could be received by any strong mind,
so as materially to interfere with its originality: and the crabbed
discipline and exact scholarship became an advantage to the men who
could pass through and despise them; so that in spite of the rules of
the drama we had Shakspeare, and in spite of the rules of art we had
Tintoret,--both of them, to this day, doing perpetual violence to the
vulgar scholarship and dim-eyed proprieties of the multitude.

Sec. XC. But in architecture it was not so; for that was the art of the
multitude, and was affected by all their errors; and the great men who
entered its field, like Michael Angelo, found expression for all the
best part of their minds in sculpture, and made the architecture merely
its shell. So the simpletons and sophists had their way with it: and the
reader can have no conception of the inanities and puerilities of the
writers, who, with the help of Vitruvius, re-established its "five
orders," determined the proportions of each, and gave the various
recipes for sublimity and beauty, which have been thenceforward followed
to this day, but which may, I believe, in this age of perfect machinery,
be followed out still farther. If, indeed, there are only five perfect
forms of columns and architraves, and there be a fixed proportion to
each, it is ce