othic, and to
enable him thus to judge, not merely of the beauty of the forms which
that system has produced already, but of its future applicability to the
wants of mankind, and endless power over their hearts. I would now
endeavor, in like manner, to set before the reader the Nature of
Renaissance, and thus to enable him to compare the two styles under the
same light, and with the same enlarged view of their relations to the
intellect, and capacities for the service, of man.

Sec. IV. It will not be necessary for me to enter at length into any
examination of its external form. It uses, whether for its roofs of
aperture or roofs proper, the low gable or circular arch: but it differs
from Romanesque work in attaching great importance to the horizontal
lintel or architrave _above_ the arch; transferring the energy of the
principal shafts to the supporting of this horizontal beam, and thus
rendering the arch a subordinate, if not altogether a superfluous,
feature. The type of this arrangement has been given already at _c_,
Fig. XXXVI., p. 145, Vol. I.: and I might insist at length upon the
absurdity of a construction in which the shorter shaft, which has the
real weight of wall to carry, is split into two by the taller one, which
has nothing to carry at all,--that taller one being strengthened,
nevertheless, as if the whole weight of the building bore upon it; and
on the ungracefulness, never conquered in any Palladian work, of the two
half-capitals glued, as it were, against the slippery round sides of the
central shaft. But it is not the form of this architecture against which
I would plead. Its defects are shared by many of the noblest forms of
earlier building, and might have been entirely atoned for by excellence
of spirit. But it is the moral nature of it which is corrupt, and which
it must, therefore, be our principal business to examine and expose.

Sec. V. The moral, or immoral, elements which unite to form the spirit
of Central Renaissance architecture are, I believe, in the main,
two,--Pride and Infidelity; but the pride resolves itself into three
main branches,--Pride of Science, Pride of State, and Pride of System:
and thus we have four separate mental conditions which must be examined
successively.

Sec. VI. 1. PRIDE OF SCIENCE. It would have been more charitable, but more
confusing, to have added another element to our list, namely the _Love_
of Science; but the love is included in the pride, and is usual