odels can be
given. Exactly so far as architecture works on known rules, and from
given models, it is not an art, but a manufacture; and it is, of the two
procedures, rather less rational (because more easy) to copy capitals or
mouldings from Phidias, and call ourselves architects, than to copy
heads and hands from Titian, and call ourselves painters.

Sec. XXIX. Let us then understand at once, that change or variety is as
much a necessity to the human heart and brain in buildings as in books;
that there is no merit, though there is some occasional use, in
monotony; and that we must no more expect to derive either pleasure or
profit from an architecture whose ornaments are of one pattern, and
whose pillars are of one proportion, than we should out of a universe in
which the clouds were all of one shape, and the trees all of one size.

Sec. XXX. And this we confess in deeds, though not in words. All the
pleasure which the people of the nineteenth century take in art, is in
pictures, sculpture, minor objects of virtu, or mediaeval architecture,
which we enjoy under the term picturesque: no pleasure is taken anywhere
in modern buildings, and we find all men of true feeling delighting to
escape out of modern cities into natural scenery: hence, as I shall
hereafter show, that peculiar love of landscape which is characteristic
of the age. It would be well, if, in all other matters, we were as ready
to put up with what we dislike, for the sake of compliance with
established law, as we are in architecture.

Sec. XXXI. How so debased a law ever came to be established, we shall see
when we come to describe the Renaissance schools: here we have only to
note, as the second most essential element of the Gothic spirit, that it
broke through that law wherever it found it in existence; it not only
dared, but delighted in, the infringement of every servile principle;
and invented a series of forms of which the merit was, not merely that
they were new, but that they were _capable of perpetual novelty_. The
pointed arch was not merely a bold variation from the round, but it
admitted of millions of variations in itself; for the proportions of a
pointed arch are changeable to infinity, while a circular arch is always
the same. The grouped shaft was not merely a bold variation from the
single one, but it admitted of millions of variations in its grouping,
and in the proportions resultant from its grouping. The introduction of
tracery was n