come; and then, perhaps, the public may recover its patience again. For
certainly it is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must
say all he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his reader is
sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words, or his reader
will certainly misunderstand them. Generally, also, a downright fact may
be told in a plain way; and we want downright facts at present more than
anything else. And though I often hear moral people complaining of the
bad effects of want of thought, for my part, it seems to me that one of
the worst diseases to which the human creature is liable is its disease
of thinking. If it would only just _look_[19] at a thing instead of
thinking what it must be like, or _do_ a thing instead of thinking it
cannot be done, we should all get on far better.

[Note 19: There can be no question, however, of the mischievous
tendency of the hurry of the present day, in the way people undertake
this very _looking_. I gave three years' close and incessant labour to
the examination of the chronology of the architecture of Venice; two
long winters being wholly spent in the drawing of details on the spot;
and yet I see constantly that architects who pass three or four days in
a gondola going up and down the Grand Canal, think that their first
impressions are just as likely to be true as my patiently wrought
conclusions. Mr. Street, for instance, glances hastily at the facade of
the Ducal Palace--so hastily that he does not even see what its pattern
is, and misses the alternation of red and black in the centres of its
squares--and yet he instantly ventures on an opinion on the chronology
of its capitals, which is one of the most complicated and difficult
subjects in the whole range of Gothic archaeology. It may, nevertheless,
be ascertained with very fair probability of correctness by any person
who will give a month's hard work to it, but it can be ascertained no
otherwise.]

* * * * *

Note 7th, p. 147.--"_Pilots of the State._"

142. While, however, undoubtedly, these responsibilities attach to every
person possessed of wealth, it is necessary both to avoid any stringency
of statement respecting the benevolent modes of spending money, and to
admit and approve so much liberty of spending it for selfish pleasures
as may distinctly make wealth a personal _reward_ for toil, and secure
in the minds of all men the right of property.