III. PRIDE OF SYSTEM II. ROMAN RENAISSANCE 119

writers who, with the help of Vitruvius, re-established its “five orders,”¹ determined the proportions of each, and gave the various recipes for sublimity and beauty, which have been thenceforward followed to this day, but which may, I believe, in this age of perfect machinery, be followed out still farther. If, indeed, there are only five perfect forms of columns and architraves, and there be a fixed proportion to each, it is certainly possible, with a little ingenuity, so to regulate a stone-cutting machine as that it shall furnish pillars and friezes, to the size ordered, of any of the five orders, on the most perfect Greek models, in any quantity; an epitome, also, of Vitruvius may be made so simple as to enable any bricklayer to set them up at their proper distances, and we may dispense with our architects altogether.

§ 91. But if this be not so, and there be any truth in the faint persuasion which still lurks in men’s mind that architecture is an art, and that it requires some gleam of intellect to practise it, then let the whole system of the orders and their proportions be cast out and trampled down as the most vain, barbarous, and paltry deception that was ever stamped on human prejudice; and let us understand this plain truth, common to all work of man, that, if it be good work, it is not a copy, nor anything done by rule, but a freshly and divinely imagined thing. Five orders! There is not a side chapel in any Gothic cathedral but it has fifty orders, the worst of them better than the best of the Greek ones, and all new; and a single inventive human soul could create a thousand orders in an hour.* And this would have been discovered even in the worst times, but that, as I said, the greatest men of the age found expression for their invention in the other arts, and the

* That is to say, orders separated by such distinctions as the old Greek ones; considered with reference to the bearing power of the capital, all orders may be referred to two, as long ago stated;² just as trees may be referred to the two great classes, monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous.

¹ [See Vol. IX. pp. 35, 426.]

² [See Ibid., p. 34.]

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