44 PAPERS, ETC. 
versal—have one thing above the rest, either by size, or 
office, or interest. Don’t put the pinnacles without the 
spire. What a host of ugly church towers have we in 
England, with pinnacles at the corners, and none in the 
middle! How many buildings like King’s College Chapel, 
at Cambridge, looking like tables upside down, with their 
four legs in the air! What! it will be said, have not 
beasts four legs? Yes, but legs of different shapes, and 
with a head between them. So they have a pair of ears, 
and perhaps a pair of horms—but not at both ends. 
Knock down a couple of pinnacles at either end in King’s 
College Chapel, and you will have a kind of proportion 
instantly.”* 
I am really ashamed to read out talk of this kind before 
a rational audience; but the passage is a good sample of 
Mr. Ruskin’s diction and logie. Here we have “a monarch 
with a lowly train ;” here “a table upside down, with its 
four legs in the air.” Why should not the table stand 
erect, and the monarch be reversed, so as to realize at once 
the Herodotean tale of Hippocleides? But the real ques- 
tion is, what have either the monarch or the table, to say 
nothing of the horses, goats, camels, or hippopotami, 
which come after them, to do with St. Cuthbert’s tower, 
and King’s College Chapel? Herein lies the great force 
of Mr. Ruskin’s style of logie. He puts two things to- 
gether by an arbitrary juxta-position, and then expects you, 
first of all, to accept the juxta-position as an analogy, and 
finally to accept the analogy as an argument. What has a 
monarch and his lowly train to do with it? Why may I 
not, in the nineteenth century, erect, if I think good, a 
thoroughly republican steeple? Why may I not, if I 
choose, like some of my friends, to symbolize ecclesiastical 
* Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 115. 
