100 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

river sides, the love of nature was uprooted from the hearts of men, base luxuries and cruel formalisms were festered and frozen into them from their youth; and at last, where, from his fair Gothic chapel beside the Seine, the king St. Louis had gone forth, followed by his thousands in the cause of Christ, another king was dragged forth from the gates of his Renaissance palace,* to die, by the hands of the thousands of his people gathered in another crusade; or what shall that be called-whose sign was not the cross, but the guillotine?”

76. I have not space here to pursue the subject farther, nor shall I be able to write anything more respecting architecture for some time to come. But in the meanwhile, I would most earnestly desire to leave with the reader this one subject of thought-“The Life of the Workman.” For it is singular, and far more than singular, that among all the writers who have attempted to examine the principles stated in the Stones of Venice, not one † has as yet

* The character of Renaissance architecture, and the spirit which dictated its adoption, may be remembered as having been centred and symbolised in the palace of Versailles; whose site was chosen by Louis the Fourteenth, in order that from thence he might not see St. Denis, the burial-place of his family. The cost of the palace in twenty-seven years is stated in The Builder, for March 18th, 1854, to have been £3,246,000 money of that period, equal to about seven millions now (£900,000 having been expended in the year 1686 alone). The building is thus notably illustrative of the two feelings which were stated in the Stones of Venice, to be peculiarly characteristic of the Renaissance spirit, the Pride of State and Fear of Death. Compare the horror of Louis the Fourteenth at the sight of the tower of St. Denis, with the feeling which prompted the Scaligeri at Verona to set their tombs within fifteen feet of their palace walls.¹

† An article in Fraser’s Magazine, which has appeared since these sheets were sent to press, forms a solitary exception.²

¹ [See Seven Lamps, ch. vi. (Vol. VIII. p. 247).]

² [The reference is to the second of two reviews of The Stones of Venice, in Fraser’s Magazine for April 1854, vol. 49, p. 464. It may be noted that, before this point had been driven home in the second volume of The Stones of Venice, one reviewer had noticed the hints of it in the Seven Lamps, and had referred to them as a signal instance of Ruskin’s “strangeness”: see Vol. VIII. p. xxxix. Though the fact was unknown to Ruskin at the time, the chapter in the second volume had made a profound impression on at least one reader, which was to produce much influence in good time: see Vol. X. p. lix.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]