ON THE PERPENDICULAR OF SOMERSET. 45 
facts, terminate my tower with the four Doctors of the 
church, or even with the Twelve Apostles? I cannot, 
suspect Mr. Ruskin, of all men, of wishing to violate the 
strietest equalitiy among the latter. Fresh from “the 
Stones of Venice,” I would fain, if any conceivable shape 
of tower would allow me, erown my edifice with a Council 
of Ten; will my master require greater pre-eminence 
to be anywhere assigned than that belonging to the little 
Doge who tries so modestly to bring himself into notice 
at the corners of Taunton and Weston Zoyland? What 
would Mr. Ruskin have done had he lived 
“ In lordly Lacedzemon, 
The City of two Kings ?” 
How would he have designed a rival to the Giralda, in 
the reign of Ferdinand and Isabel? Again, he tells us, 
“ what, it will be said, have not beasts four legs?” By 
whom will it be said? Could the idea enter into any 
man’s head but his own, that the legs of beasts could prove 
anything, either way, as to the beauty of King’s College 
Chapel? I am fully aware that beasts have four legs, just 
as other members of the animal kingdom have two, six, 
eight, or ahundred ; but I am too blind to see how any 
architectural principle can be deduced from this most 
indisputable fact. And as for the beasts “ with legs of 
different shapes, and with a head between them,” I much 
doubt whether the deserts of Africa, or the sculptures of 
Nimroud, exhibit anything half so marvellous. I must 
appeal to the Natural History section of the Society to 
inform me whether any such are to be found in rerum 
natura. * 
* ] have since discovered that, if not in nature, they at least exist in 
art. In Mr. Wilson’s Archzology of Scotland, p. 556, an animal is 
represented exactly realizing Mr, Ruskin’s hippogryph or martichoras, 
