porch the joints of every stone are
visible, and you will find me in the Fifth Lecture insisting on this
clearness of its anatomy as a merit; yet so independent is the
mechanical structure of the true design, that when I begin my Lectures
on Architecture, the first building I shall give you as a standard will
be one in which the structure is wholly concealed. It will be the
Baptistry of Florence, which is, in reality, as much a buttressed chapel
with a vaulted roof, as the Chapter House of York--but round it, in
order to conceal that buttressed structure, (not to decorate, observe,
but to _conceal_) a flat external wall is raised; simplifying the whole
to a mere hexagonal box, like a wooden piece of Tunbridge ware, on the
surface of which the eye and intellect are to be interested by the
relations of dimension and curve between pieces of encrusting marble of
different colours, which have no more to do with the real make of the
building than the diaper of a Harlequin's jacket has to do with his
bones.

[Illustration: PLATE II.--THE ARETHUSA OF SYRACUSE.]

[Illustration: PLATE III.--THE WARNING TO THE KINGS.

San Zenone. Verona.]

25. The sense of abstract proportion, on which the enjoyment of such a
piece of art entirely depends, is one of the aesthetic faculties which
nothing can develop but time and education. It belongs only to
highly-trained nations; and, among them, to their most strictly refined
classes, though the germs of it are found, as part of their innate
power, in every people capable of art. It has for the most part vanished
at present from the English mind, in consequence of our eager desire for
excitement, and for the kind of splendour that exhibits wealth, careless
of dignity; so that, I suppose, there are very few now even of our
best-trained Londoners who know the difference between the design of
Whitehall and that of any modern club-house in Pall-mall. The order and
harmony which, in his enthusiastic account of the Theatre of Epidaurus,
Pausanias insists on before beauty, can only be recognized by stern
order and harmony in our daily lives; and the perception of them is as
little to be compelled, or taught suddenly, as the laws of still finer
choice in the conception of dramatic incident which regulate poetic
sculpture.

26. And now, at last, I think, we can sketch out the subject before us
in a clear light. We have a structural art, divine, and human, of which
the investigation comes under the