ting against my
close examination of details, is simply that they know they dare not
meet me on that ground. Being, as I have said, in reality _not_
architects, but builders, they can indeed raise a large building, with
copied ornaments, which, being huge and white, they hope the public may
pronounce "handsome." But they cannot design a cluster of
oak-leaves--no, nor a single human figure--no, nor so much as a beast,
or a bird, or a bird's nest! Let them first learn to invent as much as
will fill a quatre-foil, or point a pinnacle, and then it will be time
enough to reason with them on the principles of the sublime.

65. But farther. The things that I have dwelt upon in examining
buildings, though often their least parts, are always in reality their
principal parts. That is the principal part of a building in which its
mind is contained, and that, as I have just shown, is its sculpture--and
painting. I do with a building as I do with a man, watch the eye and the
lips: when they are bright and eloquent, the form of the body is of
little consequence.

Whatever other objections have been made to this second proposition,
arise, as far as I remember, merely from a confusion of the idea of
essentialness or primariness with the idea of nobleness. The essential
thing in a building,--its _first_ virtue,--is that it be strongly
built, and fit for its uses. The noblest thing in a building, and its
_highest_ virtue, is that it be nobly sculptured or painted.[22]

[Footnote 22: Of course I use the term painting as including every mode
of applying color.]

66. One or two important corollaries yet remain to be stated. It has
just been said that to sacrifice the convenience of a building to its
external appearance is a futility and absurdity, and that convenience
and stability are to be attained at the smallest cost. But when that
convenience _has_ been attained, the adding the noble characters of life
by painting and sculpture, is a work in which all possible cost may be
wisely admitted. There is great difficulty in fully explaining the
various bearings of this proposition, so as to do away with the chances
of its being erroneously understood and applied. For although, in the
first designing of the building, nothing is to be admitted but what is
wanted, and no useless wings are to be added to balance useful ones, yet
in its ultimate designing, when its sculpture and color become precious,
it may be that actual room is wanted to di