CONSTRUCTION XIV. THE ROOF CORNICE 193

had little enough ornament to spare. For instance, I suppose few persons look at the Athenæum Clubhouse¹ without feeling vexed at the meagreness and meanness of the windows of the ground floor; if, however, they look up under the cornice, and have good eyes, they will perceive that the architect has reserved his decorations to put between the brackets; and by going up to the first floor and out on the gallery, they may succeed in obtaining some glimpses of the designs of the said decorations.

§ 7. Such as they are, or were, these cornices were soon considered essential parts of the “order” to which they belonged; and the same wisdom which endeavoured to fix the proportions of the orders, appointed also that no order should go without its cornice. The reader has probably heard of the architectural division of superstructure into architrave, frieze, and cornice; parts which have been appointed by great architects to all their work, in the same spirit in which great rhetoricians have ordained that every speech shall have an exordium, and narration, and peroration. The reader will do well to consider that it may be sometimes just as possible to carry a roof, and get rid of rain, without such an arrangement, as it is to tell a plain fact without an exordium or peroration: but he must very absolutely consider that the architectural peroration or cornice is strictly and sternly limited to the end of the wall’s speech,-that is, to the edge of the roof; and that it has nothing whatever to do with shafts nor the orders of them. And he will then be able fully to enjoy the farther ordinance of the late Roman and Renaissance architects, who, attaching it to the shaft as if it were part of its shadow, and having to employ their shafts often in places where they came not near the roof, forthwith cut the roof-cornice to pieces, and attached a bit of it to every column; thenceforward to be carried by the unhappy shaft wherever it went, in addition to any other work on which it might happen to be employed. I do not recollect among any living

¹ [For other references to the architecture of this clubhouse, built by Decimus Burton 1824-26, see below, p. 335, and Fors Clavigera, Letter 23.]

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