when I begin my Lectures
on Architecture, the first building I shall give you as a standard will
be one in which the structure is wholly concealed. It will be the
Baptistery of Florence, which is, in reality, as much a buttressed
chapel with a vaulted roof, as the Chapter House of York;--but round it,
in order to conceal that buttressed structure, (not to decorate,
observe, but to _conceal_,) a flat external wall is raised; simplifying
the whole to a mere hexagonal box, like a wooden piece of Tunbridge
ware, on the surface of which the eye and intellect are to be interested
by the relations of dimension and curve between pieces of incrusting
marble of different colors, which have no more to do with the real make
of the building than the diaper of a Harlequin's jacket has to do with
his bones.

25. The sense of abstract proportion, on which the enjoyment of such a
piece of art entirely depends, is one of the aesthetic faculties which
nothing can develop but time and education. It belongs only to highly
trained nations; and, among them, to their most strictly refined
classes, though the germs of it are found, as part of their innate
power, in every people capable of art. It has for the most part vanished
at present from the English mind, in consequence of our eager desire for
excitement, and for the kind of splendor that exhibits wealth, careless
of dignity; so that, I suppose, there are very few now even of our best
trained Londoners who know the difference between the design of
Whitehall and that of any modern club-house in Pall Mall. The order and
harmony which, in his enthusiastic account of the Theater of Epidaurus,
Pausanias insists on before beauty, can only be recognized by stern
order and harmony in our daily lives; and the perception of them is as
little to be compelled, or taught suddenly, as the laws of still finer
choice in the conception of dramatic incident which regulate poetic
sculpture.

26. And now, at last, I think, we can sketch out the subject before us
in a clear light. We have a structural art, divine and human, of which
the investigation comes under the general term Anatomy; whether the
junctions or joints be in mountains, or in branches of trees, or in
buildings, or in bones of animals. We have next a musical art, falling
into two distinct divisions--one using colors, the other masses, for its
elements of composition; lastly, we have an imitative art, concerned
with the representation of the o