rtainly possible, with a little ingenuity, so to regulate
a stonecutting machine, as that it shall furnish pillars and friezes to
the size ordered, of any of the five orders, on the most perfect Greek
models, in any quantity; an epitome, also, of Vitruvius, may be made so
simple, as to enable any bricklayer to set them up at their proper
distances, and we may dispense with our architects altogether.

Sec. XCI. But if this be not so, and there be any truth in the faint
persuasion which still lurks in men's minds that architecture _is_ an
art, and that it requires some gleam of intellect to practise it, then
let the whole system of the orders and their proportions be cast out and
trampled down as the most vain, barbarous, and paltry deception that was
ever stamped on human prejudice; and let us understand this plain truth,
common to all work of man, that, if it be good work, it is not a copy,
nor anything done by rule, but a freshly and divinely imagined thing.
Five orders! There is not a side chapel in any Gothic cathedral but it
has fifty orders, the worst of them better than the best of the Greek
ones, and all new; and a single inventive human soul could create a
thousand orders in an hour.[24] And this would have been discovered even
in the worst times, but that, as I said, the greatest men of the age
found expression for their invention in the other arts, and the best of
those who devoted themselves to architecture were in great part occupied
in adapting the construction of buildings to new necessities, such as
those developed by the invention of gunpowder (introducing a totally new
and most interesting science of fortification, which directed the
ingenuity of Sanmicheli and many others from its proper channel), and
found interest of a meaner kind in the difficulties of reconciling the
obsolete architectural laws they had consented to revive, and the forms
of Roman architecture which they agreed to copy, with the requirements
of the daily life of the sixteenth century.

Sec. XCII. These, then, were the three principal directions in which
the Renaissance pride manifested itself, and its impulses were rendered
still more fatal by the entrance of another element, inevitably
associated with pride. For, as it is written, "He that trusteth in his
own heart is a fool," so also it is written, "The fool hath said in his
heart, There is no God;" and the self-adulation which influenced not
less the learning of the age than its