hitecture merely useful; but there
is a great deal of Sculpture--as this crystal ball[108] for instance,
which is not imitative, and a great deal of Architecture which, to some
extent is so, as the so called foils of Gothic apertures; and for many
other reasons you will find it necessary to keep distinction clear in
your minds between the arts--of whatever kind--which are imitative, and
produce a resemblance or image of something which is not present; and
those which are limited to the production of some useful reality, as the
blade of a knife, or the wall of a house. You will perceive also, as we
advance, that sculpture and painting are indeed in this respect only one
art; and that we shall have constantly to speak and think of them as
simply _graphic_, whether with chisel or colour, their principal
function being to make us, in the words of Aristotle, "[Greek:
theoretikoi tou peri ta somata kallous]" (Polit. 8, 3.), "having
capacity and habit of contemplation of the beauty that is in material
things;" while Architecture, and its co-relative arts, are to be
practised under quite other conditions of sentiment.

8. Now it is obvious that so far as the fine arts consist either in
imitation or mechanical construction, the right judgment of them must
depend on our knowledge of the things they imitate, and forces they
resist: and my function of teaching here would (for instance) so far
resolve itself, either into demonstration that this painting of a
peach,[109] does resemble a peach, or explanation of the way in which
this ploughshare (for instance) is shaped so as to throw the earth aside
with least force of thrust. And in both of these methods of study,
though of course your own diligence must be your chief master, to a
certain extent your Professor of Art can always guide you securely, and
can show you, either that the image does truly resemble what it attempts
to resemble, or that the structure is rightly prepared for the service
it has to perform. But there is yet another virtue of fine art which is,
perhaps, exactly that about which you will expect your Professor to
teach you most, and which, on the contrary, is exactly that about which
you must teach yourselves all that it is essential to learn.

9. I have here in my hand one of the simplest possible examples of the
union of the graphic and constructive powers,--one of my breakfast
plates. Since all the finely architectural arts, we said, began in the
shaping of the