comes the whole majesty of him also" [no longer shattered], "and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him. And whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind them and within them." (Ibid.)

Who can wonder at the sacramental nature of trefoil and parsley? And who can complain if, whilst other children forget their copy-books, these masonic royalties hang up theirs for the wonderment of succeeding ages? Strange or not, there they are, and you are commanded to look on them:

"Go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often" [not, of course, as the preparation for religious worship], "at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stone statues anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone.” (Ibid.)

or

Such then is the artistic result of the gymnasium,

transfiguration" process. We have all read of "the right divine of kings to govern wrong: " here is the correlative right of " dulness" to disfigure cathedral fronts,— the ultima ratio, in fact, of shattered majesty, "ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stone statues, anatomiless and rigid.”

We may not swell these pages with self-evident deductions: yet it is impossible to withhold a further word as to the social part of the subject.

In all Greek, Assyrian, Egyptian, and Renaissance work, the inferior workman was, it seems, a "slave. Not to lose ourselves in expressions that measure

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the slavery a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of scourged African or Helot Greek,"-"prisons of the body,"-" graves of the soul," and so on: let us attempt to fathom the proximate cause of a state so direful. It is in a simple compass :

"Square stones" (Edin. Lect. p. 76.), "accurate mouldings" (Stones of Venice, chap. before quoted), and the reproduction of the same ornament, in violation of the great social law, that "as men do not commonly think the same thought twice, you are not to require of them that they shall do the same thing twice." (Edin. Lect. p. 132.)

These are serious words, very seriously uttered, and demanding, if only in courtesy, to be as seriously dealt with. No less certain is it that they cannot be taken in a restricted sense. Sound or unsound, they involve broad principles. If square stones are graves to masons, so must square walls be to bricklayers, and square boards to carpenters. If to require the inferior workman to do the same thing twice is the bitter bondage, you are bound to carry out the practical inference. The inferior mason belongs to the common lump, and can plead no speciality, whether of mind, body, or estate. Carry out, then, the great principle. Write your Magna Charta in becoming language, no two columns alike, no two hats, no two shoes, no two shirts, no two stockings, no two buttons, no two button-holes. Don't say stockings and shoes must match; that touches at best but a single pair. But all distinctions are beside the mark : enough, it is doing the same thing twice; and that is

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bondage, incarceration, intellectual, moral, and social death.

And what a prospect in the emancipation! If "there would be a resurrection" of masons, cr as of renewed souls" (Edin. Lect. p. 77.), so, of course, of shoe-makers, stocking-weavers, hat-makers, tailors, carpenters, bricklayers, plasterers, painters, brickmakers, pin-makers, stay-makers, cotton-spinnerswhere shall we stop? Why, you have but to establish the law, and you will have a general resurrection.

I will not attempt the chapter of consequences. We may certainly see much we are not prepared for, when all these renewed souls go to work each after "the will of his own on our houses, our furniture, our personal gear, and all the necessary machinery of our daily and hourly life. Some of us may be destined to a perpetual apprenticeship to the putting on and off of our own apparel. As regards Art, the result requires no prophet. If there be one fact in universal experience, it is that inferior minds are content with inferior things, and inferior workmen with inferior work. It is easy to talk of transfigurations: the conditions of the hypothesis are opposed, I had almost said, to improvement. The standard of a majority will be ever a standard of mediocrity. Let power and inferiority go together, and not only will ordinary faculties, common-place objects, and vulgar taste fix "the legal standard of imperfection," but self-sufficiency, shallow pride, ignoble selfishness, demand that every path shall be easy to all alike.

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Every virtue has its besetting vice, as every real substance has its shadow. Of true liberty, for which we all are jealous, this notion of equality is, I take it, the delusive shadow. If some of us stand in dread of sweeping radical principles, it is not, I trust, from selfish dislike to communised power, simply considered much less of pervasive light- but just of this autocratous mediocrity, this tyrannical dead level. A "commonwealth of kings" sounds fine. enough but defend us from a commonwealth of cobblers!

:

We all desire excellence for its own sake, and a steady pervasive advance towards it. Were it not a denial of the nature of things to assert that what depends on finer perceptions, loftier feelings, profounder thoughts, a more generous, self-exhausting enthusiasm, will be originated and sustained by that whose instinctive gravitation is towards equality?

But we are not yet at the terminus. The great principle of "the division of labour," is, it seems, to be abjured: and an age, boasting of progress, to retrace its steps and return to barbarism. We have, in fact, given a wrong name to the principle.

"It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men; so that all the little piece of intelligence left a man is not enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail." (Stones of Venice, same chap.)

That pin-making, whether in whole or part, should absorb a man's " soul," were indeed a murderous tyranny I would join any honest effort in putting down. But that the man's soul would be re

generated by making the whole pin instead of the point of it; and making it, not according to a fixed pattern, but "after a will of his own," involves a problem in metaphysics I want credulity to enter on. We are not even yet, however, at the goal.

"It would be well if all of us were good handicraftsmen in some kind . . and yet more, in each several profession, no master should be too proud to do the hardest work. The painter should grind his own colours; the architect work in his mason's yard with his own men; the master manufacturer be himself a more skilful operative than any man in his mills; and the distinction between one man and another be only in experience and skill" (a hard-won distinction for the master), "and the authority and wealth which these must naturally and justly obtain." (Stones of Venice, same chap.)

I am surely not overstating matters when I say that we are now beyond "constitutional ornament.” Of course, the Reformer "recks his own rede.” Of course he takes his post, now and then, with a certain black letter functionary not to be "named to ears polite." Who knows but the said functionary may be allowed the privilege of writing here and there, like medieval masons, his "grotesque" and "effective satire"?

Let us love the "inferior workman;" care for him; watch kindly and scrupulously over his proper interests and lawful rights: but let us not think of doing all this by becoming inferior workmen ourselves. Let us cherish his nobler nature: but not by turning nails and pins into heroics. Let us recognise his membership in the social body; and give him, in all