the poor, decency and wholesomeness of dress; thoroughly good in
substance, fitted for their daily work, becoming to their rank in life,
and worn with order and dignity. And this order and dignity must be
taught them by the women of the upper and middle classes, whose minds
can be in nothing right, as long as they are so wrong in this matter as
to endure the squalor of the poor, while they themselves 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 design can be bestowed upon them, than ever
the armourers of Milan and Damascus were careful of their steel.

122. 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 Stories 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 l