CH. II THE LAMP OF TRUTH 81

and when the building will be judged in its lifelessness, dying the death of the dolphin. Better the less bright,¹ more enduring fabric. The transparent alabasters of San Miniato, and the mosaics of St. Mark’s, are more warmly filled, and more brightly touched, by every return of morning and evening rays; while the hues of our cathedrals have died like the iris out of the cloud; and the temples whose azure and purple once flamed above the Grecian promontories, stand in their faded whiteness, like snows which the sunset has left cold.

§ 19. The last form of fallacy which it will be remembered we had to deprecate, was the substitution of cast or machine work for that of the hand, generally expressible as Operative Deceit.

There are two reasons, both weighty, against this practice: one, that all cast and machine work is bad, as work; the other, that it is dishonest. Of its badness I shall speak in another place,² that being evidently no efficient reason against its use when other cannot be had. Its dishonesty, however, which, to my mind, is of the grossest kind, is, I think, a sufficient reason to determine absolute and unconditional rejection of it.

Ornament, as I have often before observed, has two entirely distinct sources of agreeableness: one, that of the abstract beauty of its forms, which, for the present, we will suppose to be the same whether they come from the hand or the machine; the other, the sense of human labour and care spent upon it. How great this latter influence we may perhaps judge, by considering that there is not a cluster of weeds growing in any cranny of ruin* which has not a

* I do not see any reference to the intention of the opposite plate. It is a piece of pencil sketch from an old church at St. Lô (I believe the original drawing is now in America, belonging to my dear friend, Charles Eliot Norton3),

¹ [The MS. here shows that the author tried the words “exalted,” “elaborate,” “vast,” before he fixed upon “bright.” Below, he omitted, in revising, “grey” before cathedrals; and the words “the temples whose azure and purple” were originally “the temples whose iridescent purple.”]

² [See below, ch. v. § 21, p. 214.]

³ [The old church is the cathedral. The drawing, a portion of which is engraved, was No. 79 in the catalogue of an Exhibition of Drawings by Ruskin arranged by

VIII. F

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