external or accidental characters of a thing, not to the thing
itself. For instance, when a highland cottage roof is covered with
fragments of shale instead of slates, it becomes picturesque, because
the irregularity and rude fractures of the rocks, and their grey and
gloomy color, give to it something of the savageness, and much of the
general aspect, of the slope of a mountain side. But as a mere cottage
roof, it cannot be sublime, and whatever sublimity it derives from the
wildness or sternness which the mountains have given it in its covering,
is, so far forth, parasitical. The mountain itself would have been
grand, which is much more than picturesque; but the cottage cannot be
grand as such, and the parasitical grandeur which it may possess by
accidental qualities, is the character for which men have long agreed to
use the inaccurate word "Picturesque."

Sec. XXXVI. On the other hand, beauty cannot be parasitical. There is
nothing so small or so contemptible, but it may be beautiful in its own
right. The cottage may be beautiful, and the smallest moss that grows on
its roof, and the minutest fibre of that moss which the microscope can
raise into visible form, and all of them in their own right, not less
than the mountains and the sky; so that we use no peculiar term to
express their beauty, however diminutive, but only when the sublime
element enters, without sufficient worthiness in the nature of the thing
to which it is attached.

Sec. XXXVII. Now this picturesque element, which is always given, if by
nothing else, merely by ruggedness, adds usually very largely to the
pleasurableness of grotesque work, especially to that of its inferior
kinds; but it is not for this reason to be confounded with the
grotesqueness itself. The knots and rents of the timbers, the irregular
lying of the shingles on the roofs, the vigorous light and shadow, the
fractures and weather-stains of the old stones, which were so deeply
loved and so admirably rendered by our lost Prout, are the picturesque
elements of the architecture: the grotesque ones are those which are not
produced by the working of nature and of time, but exclusively by the
fancy of man; and, as also for the most part by his indolent and
uncultivated fancy, they are always, in some degree, wanting in
grandeur, unless the picturesque element be united with them.

Sec. XXXVIII. 3. Inordinate play. The reader will have some difficulty,
I fear, in keeping clearly in his