tting themselves to find out what they
really enjoy. All people enjoy giving away money, for instance: they
don't know _that_,--they rather think they like keeping it; and they
_do_ keep it under this false impression, often to their great
discomfort. Every body likes to do good; but not one in a hundred finds
_this_ out. Multitudes think they like to do evil; yet no man ever
really enjoyed doing evil since God made the world.

So in this lesser matter of ornament. It needs some little care to try
experiments upon yourself: it needs deliberate question and upright
answer. But there is no difficulty to be overcome, no abstruse reasoning
to be gone into; only a little watchfulness needed, and thoughtfulness,
and so much honesty as will enable you to confess to yourself and to all
men, that you enjoy things, though great authorities say you should not.

Sec. XVII. This looks somewhat like pride; but it is true humility, a
trust that you have been so created as to enjoy what is fitting for you,
and a willingness to be pleased, as it was intended you should be. It is
the child's spirit, which we are then most happy when we most recover;
only wiser than children in that we are ready to think it subject of
thankfulness that we can still be pleased with a fair color or a dancing
light. And, above all, do not try to make all these pleasures
reasonable, nor to connect the delight which you take in ornament with
that which you take in construction or usefulness. They have no
connection; and every effort that you make to reason from one to the
other will blunt your sense of beauty, or confuse it with sensations
altogether inferior to it. You were made for enjoyment, and the world
was filled with things which you will enjoy, unless you are too proud to
be pleased by them, or too grasping to care for what you cannot turn to
other account than mere delight. Remember that the most beautiful things
in the world are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance; at
least I suppose this quill I hold in my hand writes better than a
peacock's would, and the peasants of Vevay, whose fields in spring time
are as white with lilies as the Dent du Midi is with its snow, told me
the hay was none the better for them.

Sec. XVIII. Our task therefore divides itself into two branches, and these
I shall follow in succession. I shall first consider the construction of
buildings, dividing them into their really necessary members or
features; and