98 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

of all unity and principle, rose the foul torrent of the Renaissance, and swept them all away.

So fell the great dynasty of mediæval architecture.* It was because it had lost its own strength, and disobeyed its own laws-because its order, and consistency, and organisation, had been broken through-that it could oppose no resistance to the rush of overwhelming innovation. And this, observe, all because it had sacrificed a single truth. From that one surrender of its integrity, from that one endeavour to assume the semblance of what it was not, arose the multitudinous forms of disease and decrepitude, which rotted away the pillars of its supremacy. It was not because its time was come;¹ it was not because it was scorned by the classical Romanist, or dreaded by the faithful Protestant. That scorn and that fear it might have survived, and lived; it would have stood forth in stern comparison with the enervated sensuality of the Renaissance; it would have risen in renewed and purified honour, and with a new soul, from the ashes into which it sank, giving up its glory, as it had received it, for the honour of God-but its own truth was gone, and it sank for ever. There was no wisdom nor strength left in it, to raise it from the dust; and the error of zeal, and the softness of luxury, smote it down and dissolved it away.² It is good for us to remember this, as we tread upon the bare ground of its foundations, and stumble over its scattered stones. Those rent skeletons of pierced wall, through which our sea-winds moan and murmur, strewing them joint by joint, and bone by bone, along the bleak promontories on which the Pharos lights came

* The closing paragraph is very pretty-but, unfortunately-nonsense. The want of truth was only a part, and by no means an influential one, of general disease. All possible shades of human folly and licentiousness meet in late Gothic and Renaissance architecture, and corrupt, in all directions at once, the arts which are their exponents. [1880.]

¹ [The MS. inserts, “it was not because it had reached its perfection, or had done its work; it had a culminating point, but not a point so high as it might have reached;”]

² [See Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. i. § 4, where it is again pointed out that the earlier schools “had lost the strength of their system before they could be struck by the plague” (of the Renaissance).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]