ON THE PERPENDICULAR OF SOMERSET. 43 
or so gently. A writer whose works have recently made 
no small stir in the architectural world, has taken upon 
him to assert that all the world is wrong in this respect, 
also, as well as in most others. The author of “the Stones of 
Venice,”*— what, by the way, would the world have thought 
if Dr. Layard had given us “the Bricks of Nineveh ?”’— 
would probably think the stones of Wrington, or even of 
Glastonbury, altogether beneath his notice ; but it is impos- 
sible for an admirer of those glorious structures to let them 
fall undefended before his attacks, even though it is only a 
stab in the dark which is aimed at them. The two great 
offences appear to be presence of pinnacles and of buttresses, 
which I, like I suppose most other people, have hitherto 
considered to be very ornamental and necessary appendages. 
Now any difference about pinnacles or buttresses with 
such men as Mr. Petit or Dr. Whewell, one would argue 
out calmly and dispassionately, and with the deference due 
to such distinguished names ; but it is impossible to pre- 
serve common patience over the childish rant with which 
Mr. Ruskin goes about to prove pinnacles offenders against 
what he calls the “Lamp of Beauty.” “I believe,” he says, 
“that all that has been written and taught about propor- 
tion put together, is not to the architect worth the single 
rule, well enforced : ‘Have one large thing and several 
smaller things, or one principal thing and several inferior 
things, and bind them well together’ Sometimes there 
may be a regular gradation, as between the heights of 
stories in good designs for houses; sometimes a monarch 
with a lowly train, as in the spire with its pinnacles.. The 
varieties of arrangement are infinite, but the law is uni- 
* The Committee beg it to be’understood, that while giving free scope 
to fair criticism, they do not commit either themselves or the Society to 
the adoption of the opinions expressed by contributors. 
r3 
