78 THE STONES OF VENICE II. PRIDE OF STATE

of delight for their hardy spirit, pure, simple, and yet rich as the fretwork of flowers and moss watered by some strong and stainless mountain stream: and base in its indulgence; as it granted to the body what it withdrew from the heart, and exhausted, in smoothing the pavement for the painless feet, and softening the pillow for the sluggish brain, the powers of art which once had hewn rough ladders into the clouds of heaven, and set up the stones by which they rested for houses of God.

§ 43. And just in proportion as this courtly sensuality lowered the real nobleness of the men whom birth or fortune raised above their fellows, rose their estimate of their own dignity, together with the insolence and unkindness of its expression, and the grossness of the flattery with which it was fed. Pride is indeed the first and last among the sins of men, and there is no age of the world in which it has not been unveiled in the power and prosperity of the wicked. But there was never in any form of slavery, or of feudal supremacy, a forgetfulness so total of the common majesty of the human soul, and of the brotherly kindness due from man to man, as in the aristocratic follies of the Renaissance. I have not space to follow out this most interesting and extensive subject; but here is a single and very curious example of the kind of flattery with which architectural teaching was mingled, when addressed to the men of rank of the day.

§ 44. In St. Mark’s library there is a very curious Latin manuscript of the twenty-five books of Averulinus, a Florentine architect, upon the principles of his art.¹ The book was written in or about 1460, and translated into Latin, and richly illuminated for Corvinus, King of Hungary, about 1483. I extract from the third book the following passage on the nature of stones:-“As there are three genera of men,-that is to say, nobles, men of the middle classes, and rustics,-so it appears that there are of stones. For the marbles and common stones of which we have

¹ [Referred to also in Vol. X. ch. iv. § 33 n.]

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