and
both become ignoble, when conceived by a mind jaded and satiated. The
subdivision in fig. 13 as compared with the type, fig. 12, which it was
intended to improve, is the sign, not of a mind which loved intricacy,
but of one which could not relish simplicity, which had not strength
enough to enjoy the broad masses of the earlier leaves, and cut them to
pieces idly, like a child tearing the book which, in its weariness, it
cannot read. And on the other hand, we shall continually find, in other
examples of work of the same period, an unwholesome breadth or
heaviness, which results from the mind having no longer any care for
refinement or precision, nor taking any delight in delicate forms, but
making all things blunted, cumbrous, and dead, losing at the same time
the sense of the elasticity and spring of natural curves. It is as if
the soul of man, itself severed from the root of its health, and about
to fall into corruption, lost the perception of life in all things
around it; and could no more distinguish the wave of the strong
branches, full of muscular strength and sanguine circulation, from the
lax bending of a broken cord, nor the sinuousness of the edge of the
leaf, crushed into deep folds by the expansion of its living growth,
from the wrinkled contraction of its decay.[1] Thus, in morals, there
is a care for trifles which proceeds from love and conscience, and is
most holy; and a care for trifles which comes of idleness and frivolity,
and is most base. And so, also, there is a gravity proceeding from
thought, which is most noble; and a gravity proceeding from dulness and
mere incapability of enjoyment, which is most base. Now, in the various
forms assumed by the later Gothic of Venice, there are one or two
features which, under other circumstances, would not have been signs of
decline; but, in the particular manner of their occurrence here,
indicate the fatal weariness of decay. Of all these features the most
distinctive are its crockets and finials.

Sec. XIV. There is not to be found a single crocket or finial upon any
part of the Ducal Palace built during the fourteenth century; and although
they occur on contemporary, and on some much earlier, buildings, they
either indicate detached examples of schools not properly Venetian, or
are signs of incipient decline.

The reason of this is, that the finial is properly the ornament of
gabled architecture; it is the compliance, in the minor features of the
build