[M.75L]                                                               [M.75]	St Marks Place.	75
                                                                      
                                                                      Chance. 		It is, I suppose, an architect’s chief sorrow that his best designs
                                                                      Its influence	must depend for their accomplishment upon accident and that
                                                                      on Architects	of his best skill and patience can be of little avail unless
                                                                      		they without the concurrence of national caprice: Happy, if
                                                                      		during his lifetime, he be permitted to see the completion
                                                                      		of his designs:  and not be not compelled to depute their
                                                                      		execution on his death bed to ignorance or envy - he yet leaves a work dependent
                                                                      		for its effect and appreciation upon associations over which
                                                                      		he has no control:  (The painter has nothing to dread but
                                                                      		the common foes of all greatness - neglect or misrepresentation)
                                                                      		and the changed humour of a generation may at any time
                                                                      		destroy by juxtaposition of incongruous edifices, what perhaps
                                                                      		it is only too indolent or too poor altogether to sweep away;
                                                                      		His sorrow should perhaps change into humiliation, when he
                                                                      		remembers that of the effects produced in this kind by the
                                                                      		works even of the greatest men, the noblest have commonly
                                                                      		been fortuitous: and that there are few very impressive
                                                                      		edifices whose greatest beauty has not been as unintentional
                                                                      		as the grace of a child’s motion;  or the lustre of a passing wave
                                                                      		and that Men converse, commonly - to the best purpose - when
                                                                      		they converse little to their own knowledge, as the rain does in the rainbow - unconscious
                                                                      		alike of the light it reflects and the Sign it bears each
                                                                      		on his own path

[Version 0.05: May 2008]