62 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

thought there is in a cathedral front, a hundred feet wide, every inch of which is wrought with sculpture like this! And every front of our thirteenth century cathedrals is inwrought with sculpture of this quality!¹ And yet you quietly allow yourselves to be told that the men who thus wrought were barbarians, and that your architects are wiser and better in covering your walls with sculpture of this kind (fig. 14).

38. Walk round your Edinburgh buildings, and look at the height of your eye, what you will get from them. Nothing but square-cut stone-square-cut stone-a wilderness of square-cut stone for ever and for ever; so that your houses look like prisons, and truly are so; for the worst feature of Greek architecture is, indeed, not its costliness, but its tyranny. These square stones are not prisons of the body, but graves of the soul; for the very men who could do sculpture like this of Lyons for you are here! still here, in your despised workmen: the race has not degenerated, it is you who have bound them down, and buried them beneath your Greek stones. There would be a resurrection of them, as of renewed souls, if you would only lift the weight of these weary walls from off their hearts.*

39. But I am leaving the point immediately in question,

* This subject is farther pursued in the Addenda at the end of this Lecture [p. 85].

¹ [In the MS. Ruskin added here:-

“And here, in passing, let me briefly assure you of a fact-beg of you, as you have time and opportunity-to pay your utmost attention to this branch of art, the sculpture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. I cannot tell you how great, how wonderful it is-and that almost everywhere. You are all interested in modern sculpture; you were all delighted with the sculpture in the Great Exhibition: and yet I assure you there is more good and interesting sculpture in a single wing of a good thirteenth century cathedral, than in ten great exhibitions. Let me again and again entreat you to pay more attention to this much neglected subject. You will never make greater progress in art than by close study of thirteenth-century work, and if you do not learn to know its value soon, you will mourn over it when it is too late, for day by day the rage of the Revolutionist, and the ignorance of the Restorer are dashing into dust unregretted and unrecognised treasures, for which it will be known in a little while that the contents of the noblest galleries in Europe might cheaply have been exchanged.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]