t of the
rough Roman or barbarian. They do not care to be understood. They care
only to speak finely, and be thought great orators, if one could only
hear them. So I leave you to choose between the old men, who took
minutes to tell things plainly, and the modern men, who take days to
tell them unintelligibly.

Sec. XXIV. All expedients of this kind, both of simplification and energy,
for the expression of details at a distance where their actual forms
would have been invisible, but more especially this linear method, I
shall call Proutism; for the greatest master of the art in modern times
has been Samuel Prout. He actually takes up buildings of the later times
in which the ornament has been too refined for its place, and
translates it into the energised linear ornament of earlier art: and to
this power of taking the life and essence of decoration, and putting it
into a perfectly intelligible form, when its own fulness would have been
confused, is owing the especial power of his drawings. Nothing can be
more closely analogous than the method with which an old Lombard uses
his chisel, and that with which Prout uses the reed-pen; and we shall
see presently farther correspondence in their feeling about the
enrichment of luminous surfaces.

Sec. XXV. Now, all that has been hitherto said refers to ornament whose
distance is fixed, or nearly so; as when it is at any considerable
height from the ground, supposing the spectator to desire to see it, and
to get as near it as he can. But the distance of ornament is never fixed
to the _general_ spectator. The tower of a cathedral is bound to look
well, ten miles off, or five miles, or half a mile, or within fifty
yards. The ornaments of its top have fixed distances, compared with
those of its base; but quite unfixed distances in their relation to the
great world: and the ornaments of the base have no fixed distance at
all. They are bound to look well from the other side of the cathedral
close, and to look equally well, or better, as we enter the cathedral
door. How are we to manage this?

Sec. XXVI. As nature manages it. I said above, Sec. XVII., that for
every distance from the eye there was a different system of form in all
natural objects: this is to be so then in architecture. The lesser
ornament is to be grafted on the greater, and third or fourth orders of
ornaments upon this again, as need may be, until we reach the limits of
possible sight; each order of ornament being a