105			75
                                                                      
                                                                       			      ST MARK’S PLACE.
                                                                      Chance.	It is, I suppose, an architect’s chief sorrow that his best
                                                                      	Designs must depend for their accomplishment upon accident
                                                                      and that of his best skill and patience can be of little
                                                                      avail unless without the concurrence of national caprice:
                                                                      Happy, if during his lifetime, he, be permitted to see the
                                                                      completion of his des[g]igns:  and nor be compelled to de-
                                                                      pute their execution on his death bed to ignorance or envy
                                                                      he yet leaves a work dependent for its effect upon associan[i]
                                                                      tion over which he has no control:  (The painter has noth
                                                                      thing to dread but the common foes of all greatness - ne-
                                                                      glect 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 indo-
                                                                      lent 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: that there are few very impressive edifices
                                                                      whose greatest beauty has not been an 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 this light it reflects and the Sign it bears -

[Version 0.05: May 2008]