CH. IV THE LAMP OF BEAUTY 157

decorate things belonging to purposes of active and occupied life.¹ Wherever you can rest, there decorate; where rest is forbidden, so is beauty. You must not mix ornament with business, any more than you may mix play. Work first, and then rest. Work first, and then gaze, but do not use golden ploughshares, nor bind ledgers in enamel. Do not thrash with sculptured flails:* nor put bas-reliefs on millstones. What ! it will be asked, are we in the habit of doing so? Even so; always and everywhere. The most familiar position of Greek mouldings is in these days on shop fronts. There is not a tradesman’s sign nor shelf nor counter in all the streets of all our cities, which has not upon it ornaments which were invented to adorn temples and beautify kings’ palaces. There is not the smallest advantage in them where they are. Absolutely valueless-utterly without the power of giving pleasure, they only satiate the eye, and vulgarise their own forms. Many of these are in themselves thoroughly good copies of fine things, which things themselves we shall never, in consequence, enjoy any more. Many a pretty beading and graceful bracket there is in wood or stucco above our grocers’ and cheesemongers’ and hosiers’ shops: how is it that the tradesmen cannot understand that custom is to be had only by selling good tea and cheese and cloth, and that people come to them for their honesty, and their readiness, and their right wares, and not because they have Greek cornices over their windows, or their names in large gilt letters on their house fronts? How pleasurable it would be to have the power of going through the streets of London, pulling down

* “Nor fight with jewelled swords” should have been added. The principle is partial and doubtful, however. One of the most beautiful bits of ironwork I ever saw was an apothecary’s pestle and mortar (of the fourteenth century) at Messina:2 and a day may come when we shall wisely decorate the stilt of the plough. The error, however,-observe,-is again on the side of common sense! See 41st and 44th notes. [1880: now notes* on pp. 148, 159.]

¹ [Here, again, Ruskin is developing ideas which he had already expressed in The Poetry of Architecture (§ 64): see Vol. I. p. 56.]

² [Ruskin was in Sicily in 1874. The apothecaries’ jars, to be met with in old curiosity shops in some of the Sicilian towns, are also of considerable artistic merit.]

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