APPENDIX, 17 451

be quite justified in using it, for an elephant in reality stands on tiptoe; and this is by no means the expression of a Doric shaft. As, however, I have been obliged to speak of this treatise of Mr. Garbett’s, and desire also to recommend it as of much interest and utility in its statements of fact, it is impossible for me to pass altogether without notice, as if unanswerable, several passages in which the writer has objected to views stated in the Seven Lamps. I should at any rate have noticed the passage quoted above, (Chap. 30th,) which runs counter to the spirit of all I have ever written, though without referring to me; but the references to the Seven Lamps I should not have answered, unless I had desired, generally, to recommend the book, and partly also, because they may serve as examples of the kind of animadversion which the Seven Lamps had to sustain from architects, very generally; which examples being once answered, there will be little occasion for my referring in future to other criticisms of the kind.

The first reference to the Seven Lamps is in the second page, where Mr. Garbett asks a question, “Why are not convenience and stability enough to constitute a fine building?”-which I should have answered shortly by asking another, “Why we have been made men, and not bees nor termites:” but Mr. Garbett has given a very pretty, though partial, answer to it himself, in his 4th to 9th pages-an answer which I heartily beg the reader to consider. But, in page 12, it is made a grave charge against me, that I use the words beauty and ornament interchangeably. I do so, and ever shall; and so, I believe, one day, will Mr. Garbett himself; but not while he continues to head his pages thus:-“Beauty not dependent on ornament, or superfluous features.” What right has he to assume that ornament, rightly so called, ever was, or can be, superfluous. I have said above, and repeatedly in other places, that the most beautiful things are the most useless; I never said superfluous. I said useless in the well-understood and usual sense, as meaning, inapplicable to the service of the body. Thus I called peacocks and lilies useless; meaning, that roast peacock was unwholesome (taking Juvenal’s word for it),¹ and that dried lilies made bad hay: but I do not think peacocks superfluous birds, nor that the world could get on well without its lilies. Or, to look closer, I suppose the peacock’s blue eyes to be very useless to him; not dangerous indeed, as to their first master,² but of small service, yet I do not think there is a superfluous eye in all his tail; and for lilies, though the great King of Israel was not “arrayed” like one of them,³ can Mr. Garbett tell us which are their superfluous leaves? Is there no Diogenes among lilies? none to be found content to drink dew, but out of silver? The fact is, I never met with the architect yet who did not think ornament meant a thing to be bought in a shop, and pinned on, or left off, at architectural toilets, as the fancy seized them, thinking little more than many women do of the other kind of ornament-the only true kind-St. Peter’s kind,-“Not that outward adorning, but the inner-of the heart.”⁴ I do not mean that architects cannot conceive this better ornament, but they do not understand that it is the only ornament; that all

¹ [“Pœna tamen præsens, cum tu deponis amictus Turgidus et crudum pavonem in balnea portas,” i. 143.]

² [See Ovid, Metam. i. 720. Hermes, it will be remembered, killed Argus, and Juno put his hundred eyes into the peacock’s tail.]

³ [Matthew vi. 29.]

⁴ [1 Peter iii. 3.]

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