dress gaily. And on the proper pride and comfort of both
poor and rich in dress, must be founded the true arts of dress;
carried on by masters of manufacture no less careful of the
perfectness and beauty of their tissues, and of all that in substance
and in design can be bestowed upon them, than ever the armourers of
Milan and Damascus were careful of their steel.

Then, in the third place, having recovered some wholesome habits of
life as to food and dress, we must recover them as to lodging. I said
just now that the best architecture was but a glorified roof. Think of
it. The dome of the Vatican, the porches of Rheims or Chartres, the
vaults and arches of their aisles, the canopy of the tomb, and the
spire of the belfry, are all forms resulting from the mere requirement
that a certain space shall be strongly covered from heat and rain.
More than that--as I have tried all through _The Stones of Venice_ to
show--the lovely forms of these were every one of them developed in
civil and domestic building, and only after their invention employed
ecclesiastically on the grandest scale. I think you cannot but have
noticed here in Oxford, as elsewhere, that our modern architects never
seem to know what to do with their roofs. Be assured, until the roofs
are right, nothing else will be; and there are just two ways of
keeping them right. Never build them of iron, but only of wood or
stone; and secondly, take care that in every town the little roofs are
built before the large ones, and that everybody who wants one has got
one. And we must try also to make everybody want one. That is to say,
at some not very advanced period of life, men should desire to have a
home, which they do not wish to quit any more, suited to their habits
of life, and likely to be more and more suitable to them until their
death. And men must desire to have these their dwelling-places built
as strongly as possible, and furnished and decorated daintily, and set
in pleasant places, in bright light, and good air, being able to
choose for themselves that at least as well as swallows. And when the
houses are grouped together in cities, men must have so much civic
fellowship as to subject their architecture to a common law, and so
much civic pride as to desire that the whole gathered group of human
dwellings should be a lovely thing, not a frightful one, on the face
of the earth. Not many weeks ago an English clergyman,[198] a master of
this University, a man not