46 PAPERS, ETC, 
But there is another count against our towers; besides 
the fault of pinnacles, they have to answer the farther ac- 
cusation of buttresses! Mr. Ruskin treats us to the fol- 
lowing piece of declamation on this subject, which I should 
be exceedingly obliged to any philological friend to trans- 
late into some intelligible tongue of the Indo-Germanic 
family. 
“ There must be no light-headedness in your noble tower ; 
impregnable foundations, wrathful crest, with the vizor 
down, and the dark vigilance seen through the clefts of 
it ; not the filigree crown or embroidered cap. No towers 
are so grand as the square-browed ones with massy cornices 
and rent battlements* * * But in all of them this I believe 
to be a point of chief necessity,‚—that they shall seem to 
stand, and verily shall stand, in their own strength; not 
by help of buttresses nor artful balancings on this side or 
on that. Your noble tower must need no help, must be 
sustained by no crutches, must give place to no suspicion 
of decrepitude. Its offices may be to withstand war, look 
forth for tidings, or to point to heaven ; but it must have 
in its own walls strength to do this; it is to be in itself a 
bulwark, not to be sustained by other bulwarks ; to rise 
and look forth, “the tower of Lebanon that looketh toward 
Damascus,’ like a stern sentinel, not like a child held up 
in its nurse’s arms. A tower may indeed have a kind of 
buttress, a projection, or subordinate tower, at each end of 
its angles; but these are to its main body like the satellites 
to a shaft, joined with its strength and associated with its 
uprightness, part of the tower itself; exactly in the pro- 
portion in which they lose their massive unity with its body, 
and assume the form of true buttress walls, set on at its 
angles, the tower loses its dignity.”* 
* Stones of Venice, p. 200. 
