readth of his body on
each side. Increase the size of the megatherium a little more, and
no phosphate of lime will bear him; he would crush his own legs to
powder. (Compare Sir Charles Bell, "Bridgewater Treatise on the
Hand," p. 296, and the note.) Hence there is not only a limit to the
size of animals, in the conditions of matter, but to their activity
also, the largest being always least capable of exertion; and this
would be the case to a far greater extent, but that nature
beneficently alters her proportions as she increases her scale;
giving, as we have seen, long legs and enormous wings to the smaller
tribes, and short and thick proportion to the larger. So in
vegetables--compare the stalk of an ear of oat, and the trunk of a
pine, the mechanical relations being in both the same. So also in
waves, of which the large never can be mere exaggerations of the
small, but have different slopes and curvatures: so in mountains and
all things else, necessarily, and from ordinary mechanical laws.
Whence in architecture, according to the scale of the building, its
proportions must be altered; and I have no hesitation in calling
that unmeaning exaggeration of parts in St. Peter's, of flutings,
volutes, friezes, etc., in the proportions of a smaller building, a
vulgar blunder, and one that destroys all the majesty that the
building ought to have had--and still more I should so call all
imitations and adaptations of large buildings on a small scale. The
true test of right proportion is that it shall itself inform us of
the scale of the building, and be such that even in a drawing it
shall instantly induce the conception of the actual size, or size
intended. I know not what Fuseli means by that aphorism of his:--

"Disproportion of parts is the element of hugeness--proportion, of
grandeur. All Gothic styles of Architecture are huge. The Greek
alone is grand." When a building _is_ vast, it ought to look so; and
the proportion is right which exhibits its vastness. Nature loses no
size by her proportion; her buttressed mountains have more of Gothic
than of Greek in them.

[21] For the just and severe reproof of which, compare Sir Charles
Bell, (on the hand,) pp. 31, 32.

CHAPTER VII.

OF REPOSE, OR THE TYPE OF DIVINE PERMANENCE.

Sec. 1. Universal fe