enemy.

[16] Memoires de Commynes, liv. vii. ch. xviii.

[17] Appendix 6, "Renaissance Ornaments."

[18] Appendix 7, "Varieties of the Orders."

[19] The reader will find the _weak_ points of Byzantine
architecture shrewdly seized, and exquisitely sketched, in the
opening chapter of the most delightful book of travels I ever
opened,--Curzon's "Monasteries of the Levant."

[20] Appendix 8, "The Northern Energy."

[21] Appendix 9, "Wooden Churches of the North."

[22] Appendix 10, "Church of Alexandria."

[23] Appendix 11, "Renaissance Landscape."

[24] Selvatico, "Architettura di Venezia," p. 147.

[25] Selvatico, p. 221.

[26] The older work is of Istrian stone also, but of different
quality.

[27] Appendix 12, "Romanist Modern Art."

CHAPTER II.

THE VIRTUES OF ARCHITECTURE.

Sec. I. We address ourselves, then, first to the task of determining some
law of right which we may apply to the architecture of all the world and
of all time; and by help of which, and judgment according to which, we
may easily pronounce whether a building is good or noble, as, by
applying a plumb-line, whether it be perpendicular.

The first question will of course be: What are the possible Virtues of
architecture?

In the main, we require from buildings, as from men, two kinds of
goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be
graceful and pleasing in doing it; which last is itself another form of
duty.

Then the practical duty divides itself into two branches,--acting and
talking:--acting, as to defend us from weather or violence; talking, as
the duty of monuments or tombs, to record facts and express feelings; or
of churches, temples, public edifices, treated as books of history, to
tell such history clearly and forcibly.

We have thus, altogether, three great branches of architectural virtue,
and we require of any building,--

1. That it act well, and do the things it was intended to do in the best
way.

2. That it speak well, and say the things it was intended to say in the
best words.

3. That it look well, and please us by its presence, whatever it has to
do or say.[28]

Sec. II. Now, as regards the second of these virtues, it is evident that
we can establish no general laws. First, because it is not a virtue
required in all buildings; there are some which are only for covert or
defence, and from which we ask no conversati