of TOKIAía, however, they disappointed him. "I, indeed, saw some of them caught," he says, "but I did not hear any them speak, though I waited beside the river till sunset." 205. I must sum roughly now, for I have detained you too long. The Greeks have been thus the origin not only of all broad, mighty, and calm conception, but of all that is divided, delicate, and tremulous; "variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspen made." To them, as first leaders of ornamental design, belongs, of right, the praise of glistenings in gold, piercings in ivory, stainings in purple, burnishings in dark blue steel; of the fantasy of the Arabian roof -quartering of the Christian shield,-rubric and arabesque of Christian scripture; in fine, all enlargement, and all diminution of adorning thought, from the temple to the toy, and from the mountainous pillars of Agrigentum to the last fineness of fretwork in the Pisan Chapel of the Thorn. And in their doing all this, they stand as masters of human order and justice, subduing the animal nature guided by the spiritual one, as you see the Sicilian Charioteer stands, holding his horse-reins, with the wild lion racing beneath him, and the flying angel above, on the beautiful coin of early Syracuse; (lowest in Plate XXI.). And the beginnings of Christian chivalary were in that Greek bridling of the dark and the white horses. 206. Not that a Greek never made mistakes. He made as many as we do ourselves, nearly ;-he died of his mistakes at last as we shall die of them; but so far he was separated from the herd of more mistaken and more wretched nations -so far as he was Greek-it was by his rightness. He lived, and worked, and was satisfied with the fatness of his land, and the fame of his deeds, by his justice, and reason, and modesty. He became Græculus esuriens, little, and hungry, and every. man's errand-boy, by his iniquity, and his competition, and his love of talk. But his Græcism was in having done, at least at one period of his dominion, more than anybody else, what was modest, useful, and eternally true; and as a workman, he verily did, or first suggested the doing of, everything possible to man. Take Dædalus, his great type of the practically executive craftsman, and the inventor of expedients in craftsmanship, (as distinguished from Prometheus, the institutor of moral order in art). Dædalus invents,-he, or his nephew, The potter's wheel, and all work in clay; The saw, and all work in wood; The masts and sails of ships, and all modes of motion; (wings only proving too dangerous!) The entire art of minute ornament; By his personal toil, he involves the fatal labyrinth for Minos; builds an impregnable fortress for the Agrigentines ; adorns healing baths among the wild parsley fields of Selinus; buttresses the precipices of Eryx, under the temple of Aphrodite; and for her temple itself-finishes in exquisiteness the golden honeycomb. 207. Take note of that last piece of his art: it is connected with many things which I must bring before you when we enter on the study of architecture. That study we shall begin at the foot of the Baptistery of Florence, which, of all buildings known to me, unites the most perfect symmetry with the quaintest Toikilia. Then, from the tomb of your own Edward the Confessor, to the farthest shrine of the opposite Arabian and Indian world, I must show you how the glittering and iridescent dominion of Daedalus prevails; and his ingenuity in division, interposition, and labyrinthine sequence, more widely still. Only this last summer I found the dark red masses of the rough sandstone of Furness Abbey had been fitted by him, with no less pleasure than he had in carving them, into wedged hexagons-reminiscences of the honeycomb of Venus Erycina. His ingenuity plays around the framework of all the noblest things; and yet the brightness of it has a lurid shadow. The spot of the fawn, of the bird, and the moth, may be harmless. But Dædalus reigns no less over the spot of the leopard and snake. That cruel and venomous power of his art is marked, in the legends of him, by his invention of the saw from the serpent's tooth; and his seeking refuge, under blood-guiltiness, with Minos, who can judge evil, and measure, or remit, the penalty of it, but not reward good: Rhadamanthus only can measure that; but Miuos is essentially the recognizer of evil deeds "conoscitor delle peccata," whom, therefore, you find in Dante under the form of the ἔρπετόν. "Cignesi con la coda tante volte, quantunque gradi vuol che giu sia messa." And this peril of the influence of Dædalus is twofold; first in leading us to delight in glitterings and semblances of things, more than in their form, or truth ;-admire the harlequin's jacket more than the hero's strength; and love the gilding of the missal more than its words;-but farther, and worse, the ingenuity of Daedalus may even become bestial, an instinct for mechanical labour only, strangely involved with a feverish and ghastly cruelty :-(you will find this distinct in the intensely Dædal work of the Japanese); rebellious, finally, against the laws of nature and honour, and building labyrinths. for monsters, not combs for bees. 208. Gentlemen, we of the rough northern race may never, perhaps, be able to learn from the Greek his reverence for beauty but we may at least learn his disdain of mechanism : -of all work which he felt to be monstrous and inhuman in its imprudent dexterities. : We hold ourselves, we English, to be good workmen. I do not think I speak with light reference to recent calamity, (for I myself lost a young relation, full of hope and good purpose, in the foundered ship London,) when I say that either an Æginetan or Ionian shipwright built ships that could be fought from, though they were under water; and neither of them would have been proud of having built one that would fill and sink helplessly if the sea washed over her deck, or turn upside down if a squall struck her topsail. Believe me, gentlemen, good workmanship consists in continence and common sense, more than in frantic expatiation of mechanical ingenuity; and if you would be continent and rational, you had better learn more of Art than you do now, and less of Engineering. What is taking place at this very |