198 THE STONES OF VENICE CONSTRUCTION

setting, and in the quaint darkness of their shot-holes, and fantastic changes of elevation and outline. Nothing is more remarkable than the swiftly discerned difference between the masculine irregularity of such true battlements, and the formal pitifulness of those which are set on modern buildings to give them a military air,-as on the jail at Edinburgh.

§ 16. Respecting the parapet for mere safeguard upon buildings not military, there are just two fixed laws. It should be pierced, otherwise it is not recognised from below for a parapet at all, and it should not be in the form of a battlement, especially in church architecture.

The most comfortable heading of a true parapet is a plain level on which the arm can be rested,¹ and along which it can glide. Any jags or elevations are disagreeable; the latter, as interrupting the view and disturbing the eye, if they are higher than the arm, the former, as opening some aspect of danger if they are much lower, and the inconvenience, therefore, of the battlemented form, as well as the worse than absurdity, the bad feeling, of the appliance of a military feature to a church, ought long ago to have determined its rejection. Still (for the question of its picturesque value is here so closely connected with that of its practical use, that it is vain to endeavour to discuss it separately,) there is a certain agreeableness in the way in which the jagged outline dovetails the shadow of the slated or leaded roof into the top of the wall, which may make the use of the battlement excusable where there is a difficulty in managing some unvaried line, and where the expense of a pierced parapet cannot be encountered: but remember always, that the value of the battlement consists in its letting shadow into the light of the wall, or vice versā, when it comes against light sky, letting the light of the sky into the shade of the wall; but that the actual outline of the parapet itself, if the eye be arrested upon this, instead of upon the alteration of shadow, is as ugly a succession of line as can by any possibility be invented. Therefore, the

¹ [Cf. Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. vii. § 16, where parapets of this kind are illustrated from the Gothic palaces.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]