148 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

Place them, therefore, where they will be read, and there only; and let them be plainly written, and not turned upside down, nor wrong end first. It is an ill sacrifice to beauty to make that illegible whose only merit is in its sense. Write it as you would speak it, simply; and do not draw the eye to it when it would fain rest elsewhere, nor recommend your sentence by anything but a little openness of place and architectural silence about it.¹ Write the Commandments on the church walls where they may be plainly seen, but do not put a dash and a tail to every letter; and remember that you are an architect, not a writing master.*

§ 10. Inscriptions appear sometimes to be introduced for the sake of the scroll on which they are written; and in late and modern painted glass, as well as in architecture, these scrolls are flourished and turned hither and thither as if they were ornamental. Ribands occur frequently in arabesques,-in some of a high order, too,-tying up flowers, or flitting in and out among the fixed forms. Is there anything like ribands in nature? It might be thought that grass and seaweed afforded apologetic types. They do not. There is a wide difference between their structure and that of a riband. They have a skeleton, an anatomy, a central rib, or fibre, or framework of some kind or another, which has a beginning and an end, a root and head, and whose make and strength affect every direction of their motion, and every line of their form. The loosest weed² that drifts and waves under the heaving of the sea, or hangs heavily on the brown and slippery shore, has a marked strength, structure, elasticity, gradation of substance; its extremities are more finely fibred than its centre, its centre

* All this ninth paragraph is again extremely and extraordinarily wrong: and it is curious to me, in reviewing the progress of my own mind, to see that while everybody thought me imaginative and enthusiastic, my only fatal errors were in over-driving conditions of common sense! These two paragraphs about heraldry and writing might have been Mr. Cobden’s mistakes-or Mr. John Bright’s. [1880.]

¹ [The MS. adds, “as it were,-as you would not introduce a solemn advice with a flourish of trumpets, but with a pause.”]

² [The MS. reads “dulse” for “weed.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]