66 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

of the ancient walls, as to the voice of the man was the pining of the spectre.*

§ 9. Perhaps the most fruitful sources of these kinds of corruption which we have to guard against in recent times, is one which, nevertheless, comes in a “questionable shape,”¹ and of which it is not easy to determine the proper laws and limits; I mean the use of iron. The definition of the art of architecture, given in the first Chapter, is independent of its materials. Nevertheless, that art having been, up to the beginning of the present century, practised for the most part in clay, stone, or wood, it has resulted that the sense of proportion and the laws of structure have been based, the one altogether, the other in great part, on the necessities consequent on the employment of those materials; and that the entire or principal employment of metallic framework would, therefore, be generally felt as a departure from the first principles of the art. Abstractedly there appears no reason why iron should not be used as well as wood; and the time is probably near when a new system of architectural laws will be developed, adapted entirely to metallic construction. But I believe that the tendency of all present ^† sympathy and association is to limit the idea of architecture to non-metallic work; and that not without reason. For architecture being in its perfection the earliest, as in its elements it is necessarily the first, of arts, will always precede, in any barbarous nation, the possession of the science necessary either for the obtaining or the management of iron. Its first existence and its earliest laws must, therefore, depend upon the use of materials accessible in quantity, and on the surface of the earth; that is to

* Compare Iliad, S 219, with Odyssey, W 5-10.²

† “Present” (i.e. of the day in which I wrote), as opposed to the ferruginous temper which I saw rapidly developing itself, and which, since that day, has changed our merry England into the Man in the Iron Mask. [1880.]

¹ [Hamlet, i. 4.]

² [This was Note 6 in eds. 1 and 2, omitted in later eds. The MS. has in place of this note the following passage (see p. 276 below) which explains the references:-

“It was a curious fancy of the Greek, that wasting of the voice into a skeleton of sound. Compare the shout of Achilles in the 18th Book of the Iliad with the opening of the 24th of the Odyssey.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]