62 THE STONES OF VENICE

my best evidence respecting the character of the builders. But I cannot legalise the judgment for which I plead, nor insist upon it if it be refused. I can neither force the reader to feel this architectural rhetoric, nor compel him to confess that the rhetoric is powerful, if it have produced no impression on his own mind.

§ 3. I leave, therefore, the expression of buildings for incidental notice only. But their other two virtues are proper subjects of law,-their performance of their common and necessary work, and their conformity with universal and divine canons of loveliness: respecting these there can be no doubt, no ambiguity. I would have the reader discern them so quickly that, as he passes along a street, he may, by a glance of the eye, distinguish the noble from the ignoble work. He can do this, if he permit free play to his natural instincts; and all that I have to do for him is to remove from those instincts the artificial restraints which prevent their action, and to encourage them to an unaffected and unbiassed choice between right and wrong.¹

¹ [This chapter was among those which gave the author most trouble. It is in reality the introduction to volume i.; ch. 1., “The Quarry,” being rather a prelude to the whole work. One or two drafts of this proposed “Introduction,” or of portions of it, exist among the MSS. The general treatment of the subject is the same in all, but some of the drafts went into greater detail on particular points. One excursus of this kind, omitted when Ruskin finally compressed his chapter, is here given. It goes off from the sentence above, where Ruskin promises that the reader will have no difficulty in distinguishing noble from ignoble architecture, if only he will give free play to his natural instincts:-

“I have endeavoured to show in the third chapter of the first volume of Modern Painters that there is a right and wrong way in liking and disliking; that even the most instinctive inclinations of taste are governable, and that it is a kind of duty to direct them rightly; that is to say, to their natural food; and I endeavoured also to show that this natural food was always the most abundant. But I did not in that place notice enough the peculiar character of the adverse circumstances which keep men from liking what they ought. The fact is that man being specially and nobly endowed with Freedom of Will, is therefore exposed, and necessarily exposed, to error and danger in everything which regards him: every one of his interests requires from him definite exertion of the Will to procure its furtherance; and that exertion failing, either from neglect and not using the Will or misdirecting the Will, it is appointed that he shall be punished by some special injury or loss in the province which he has neglected. Now this love of the Beautiful is one of the natural faculties, and his enjoyment of it one of the natural interests to which his Will is perhaps of all the least frequently directed. Men do not determine to like what is beautiful; they determine to be rich or great or good; but to be happy in a simple way,

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