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INTRODUCTION lv
reflex of some popular taste or current topic of sufficient notoriety to afford scope for good-humoured satire. In 1857 the epilogue to the Adelphi of Terence contained the following dialogue:-
Ctesipho. Græcia in hac nle palmam fert semper.
Æschinus. Ineptis!
Est cumulus nudæ simplicitatis iners.
Ars contra mediæva haud lege aut limite iniquo
Contenta, huc, illue, pullulat ad libitum...
Ctesipho. An rectum atque fidem saxa laterque docent?
Æschinus. Graiâ et Romanâ nihil immoralius usquam
Archi-est-tecturâ-(turning to “The Seven Lamps” pagina sexta-tene. Sic ipsus dixit.
Ctesipho. Vix hæc comprendere possum.
Æschinus. Scilicet Æsthesi tu, miserande, cares.
And every reader will remember the lines in Charles Kingsley’s “The Invitation-To Tom Hughes” (1856):-
“Leave to Robert Browning
Beggars, fleas and vines;
Leave to mournful Ruskin
Popish Apennines,
Dirty stones of Venice,
And his Gas-lamps Seven-
We’ve the stones of Snowdon
And the lamps of heaven.”
Ruskin also had his heavenly lamps and the stones of Chamouni beneath them, but Kingsley’s lines were not, of course, to be taken seriously.
Two points may specially be noticed in which Ruskin’s work gave a new turn to the architectural movement of the day. The Gothic Revival, as has already been said (Vol. VIII., p. xlvi.), was largely bound up with Catholicism, Roman and Anglican. Pugin hoped to convert his countrymen to Rome by Christianising their architecture;1 and the High Church Party, who were pioneers in the revival of Gothic, sought to revive also ritual ceremonies and observances. Ruskin put the movement on a Protestant basis, and thus won for it a hearing in circles where it had hitherto been suspect. So, again, the movement had been mainly ecclesiastical. Ruskin made it civic. He showed that when an architecture is truly national its spirit pervades alike the temple and the palace; he illustrated-both in The Stones of Venice and again in his Edinburgh Lectures on Architecture and Painting-the derivation of eccelesiastical
1 See Vol. IX. p. 437.
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
