CH. II THE LAMP OF TRUTH 63

circumstance of which the spectator generally has no idea, and the provisions for it, consequently, circumstances whose necessity or adaptation he could not understand. It is no deceit, therefore, when the weight to be borne is necessarily unknown, to conceal also the means of bearing it, leaving only to be perceived so much of the support as is indeed adequate to the weight supposed. For the shafts do, indeed, bear as much as they are ever imagined to bear, and the system of added support is no more, as a matter of conscience, to be exhibited, than, in the human or any other form, mechanical provisions for those functions which are themselves unperceived.

But the moment that the conditions of weight are comprehended, both truth and feeling require that the conditions of support should be also comprehended. Nothing can be worse, either as judged by the taste or the conscience, than affectedly inadequate supports-suspensions in air, and other such tricks and vanities.*

§ 8. With deceptive concealments of structure are to be classed, though still more blameable, deceptive assumptions of it,-the introduction of members which should have, or profess

* Four lines are here suppressed, of attack by Mr. Hope on St. Sophia, which I do not now choose to ratify, because I have never seen St. Sophia; and of attack by myself on King’s College Chapel, at Cambridge,-which took no account of the many charming qualities possessed through its faults, nor of its superiority to everything else in its style.¹ [1880.]

¹ [The four lines (in eds. 1 and 2) are :-

“Mr. Hope wisely reprehends, for this reason, the arrangement of the main piers of St. Sophia at Constantinople. King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, is a piece of architectural juggling, if possible still more to be condemned, because less sublime.”

The book referred to is An Historical Essay on Architecture, by Thomas Hope, 2 vols.: London, 1835 (pp. 125-126). Other references to this book will be found in the review of Lord Lindsay (On the Old Road, 1899, vol. i. § 32) and in Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. ii. § 5. For another reference to King’s College Chapel, see below, ch. iv. § 26, p. 164. Writing to his father from Cambridge in 1851 (April 6), Ruskin says: “I have not been out yet, but got a glimpse of King’s College Chapel, which I think uglier even than my remembrance of it;” and again (April 7):-

“I have been seeing Cambridge to-day: to as much advantage as bitter, frosty east wind would allow. I think its details far finer than any in Oxford; as a whole it is as far inferior, and I have not said a word too much against King’s College, though it is a finer thing than any of the prints represent it.”]

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