annon-shot, and on
casts of sculpture dashed to pieces long ago. We shall gradually learn
to distinguish originality and sincerity from the decrepitudes of
imitation and palsies of repetition; but it will be only in hopelessness
to recognize the truth, that architecture and painting can be "restored"
when the dead can be raised,--and not till then.

270. Something might yet be done, if it were but possible thoroughly to
awaken and alarm the men whose studies of archaeology have enabled them
to form an accurate judgment of the importance of the crisis. But it is
one of the strange characters of the human mind, necessary indeed to its
peace, but infinitely destructive of its power, that we never thoroughly
feel the evils which are not actually set before our eyes. If, suddenly,
in the midst of the enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of
a London dinner-party, the walls of the chamber were parted, and through
their gap, the nearest human beings who were famishing, and in misery,
were borne into the midst of the company--feasting and fancy-free--if,
pale with sickness, horrible in destitution, broken by despair, body by
body, they were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of every
guest, would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast to them--would only
a passing glance, a passing thought be vouchsafed to them? Yet the
actual facts, the real relations of each Dives and Lazarus, are not
altered by the intervention of the house wall between the table and the
sick-bed--by the few feet of ground (how few!) which are indeed all that
separate the merriment from the misery.

271. It is the same in the matters of which I have hitherto been
speaking. If every one of us, who knows what food for the human heart
there is in the great works of elder time, could indeed see with his own
eyes their progressive ruin; if every earnest antiquarian, happy in his
well-ordered library, and in the sense of having been useful in
preserving an old stone or two out of his parish church, and an old coin
or two out of a furrow in the next plowed field, could indeed behold,
each morning as he awaked, the mightiest works of departed nations
moldering to the ground in disregarded heaps; if he could always have in
clear phantasm before his eyes the ignorant monk trampling on the
manuscript, the village mason striking down the monument, the court
painter daubing the despised and priceless masterpiece into freshness of
fatuity, he wo