CH. IV THE LAMP OF BEAUTY 147

decoration will utterly destroy both the power and beauty of any building. Common sense and courtesy also forbid their repetition. It is right to tell those who enter your doors that you are such a one, and of such a rank; but to tell it to them again and again, wherever they turn, becomes soon impertinence, and at last folly. Let, therefore, the entire bearings occur in few places, and these not considered as an ornament, but as an inscription; and for frequent appliance, let any single and fair symbol be chosen out of them. Thus we may multiply as much as we choose the French or the Florentine lily, or the English rose;¹ but we must not multiply a King’s arms.*

§ 9. It will also follow, from these considerations, that if any one part of heraldic decoration be worse than another, it is the motto; since, of all things unlike nature, the forms of letters are, perhaps, the most so. Even graphic tellurium and felspar look, at their clearest, anything but legible. All letters are, therefore, to be considered as frightful things,² and to be endured only upon one occasion; that is to say, in places where the sense of the inscription is of more importance than external ornament. Inscriptions in churches, in rooms, and on pictures, are often desirable, but they are not to be considered as architectural or pictorial ornaments: they are, on the contrary, obstinate offences to the eye, not to be suffered except when their intellectual office introduces them.³

* This paragraph is wholly false, and curiously so, for I had seen and loved good heraldic decoration in Italy before writing it; but let my detestation of our Houses of Parliament carry me too far,4 and without noticing where. Enough is said in praise of heraldry in my later books5 to atone for this piece of nonsense. [1880.]

¹ [Ed. 1 reads: “the French fleur-de-lis, or the Florentine giglio bianco, or the English rose.”]

² [See Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. vii. § 21 n., where this passage is referred to and in part revised. With what is said there and here about inscriptions on pictures, contrast Ruskin’s praise of “Carpaccio’s lovely signatures” (St. Mark’s Rest, § 183).]

³ [The MS. reads: “when their wisdom, appositeness, and conciseness strongly plead for them.”]

⁴ [See Vol. IV. p. 307 n.]

⁵ [See, for instance, The Eagle’s Nest, ch. x. (“The Heraldic Ordinaries”); The Laws of Fésole, ch. iii. (“The Quartering of St. George’s Shield”); and Cases 1 and 2 in Catalogue of the Rudimentary Series.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]