"Time was when everybody that made anything made a work of art
besides a useful piece of goods, and it gave them pleasure to
make it."--WILLIAM MORRIS, Address delivered at Burslem, 1881.

I.

Among the original capitals removed from the outer colonnade of the
ducal palace at Venice there is a series devoted to the teaching of
natural history, and another to that of such general facts about the
races of man, his various moral attributes and activities, as the
Venetians of the fourteenth century considered especially important.
First, botany, illustrated by the fruits most commonly in use, piled
up in baskets which constitute the funnel-shaped capital; each kind
separate, with the name underneath in funny Venetian spelling: _Huva_,
grapes; _Fici_, figs; _Moloni_, melons; _Zuche_, pumpkins; and
_Persici_, peaches. Then, with Latin names, the various animals:
_Ursus_, holding a honeycomb with bees on it; _Chanis_, mumbling only
a large bone, while his cousins, wolf and fox, have secured a duck and
a cock; _Aper_, the wild boar, munching a head of millet or similar
grain.

Now had these beautiful carvings been made with no aim besides their
own beauty, had they represented and taught nothing, they would have
received only a few casual glances, quite insufficient to make their
excellence familiar or even apparent; at best the occasional
discriminative examination of some art student; while the pleased,
spontaneous attentiveness which carries beauty deep into the soul and
the soul's storehouse would have been lacking. But consider these
capitals to have been what they undoubtedly were meant for: the
picture books and manuals off which young folks learned, and older
persons refreshed, their notions of natural history, of geography,
ethnology, and even of morals, and you will realise at once how much
attention, and of how constant and assimilative a kind, they must have
received. The child learns off them that figs (which he never sees
save packed in baskets in the barges at Rialto) have leaves like funny
gloves, while _huva_, grapes, have leaves all ribbed and looking like
tattered banners; that the bear is blunt-featured and eats honeycomb;
that foxes and wolves, who live on the mainland, are very like the
dogs we keep in Venice, but that they steal poultry instead of being
given bones from the kitchen. Also that there are in the world,
besides these clean-shaved Venetians in armour or doge's cap, bearded
As