208 * ON TASTE IN ORNAMENTAL DESIGN. Part II. 



Kules embody, and convey to students, what experience has 

 established, and they guard against error ; but] good taste, as 

 Sir W. Scott truly says, " cannot be established by canons and 

 dicta ;" and the works of the old Italian masters owe their 

 marked superiority, over those of a later and a corrupt age, 

 to their being the result of genius and feeling, while the latter 

 were subservient to technicalities and rules. " Nobody," says 

 Locke, " is made any thing by having of rules, or laying 

 them up in his memory ; practice must settle the habit of 

 doing without reflecting on the rules ; and you may as well 

 hope to make a good painter or musician extempore by a 

 lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a 

 coherent thinker, or strict reasoner, by a set of rules." To 

 trust to rules in the formation of taste is hopeless. [No art 

 ever began with rules, as grammars never formed a language ; 

 and what Horace says of words, — 



" Multa renascentur que jam cecidere, cadentque 

 Quae nunc sunt in honore vocabula, si volet usus ; 

 Quem penes arbitrium est, et jus, et norma loquendi," 



holds equally true with regard to ornamental design. But 



the changes or innovations must be such as taste and good 



judgment can sanction ; and though genius may be encouraged 



to invent, arbitrary ornament should not be tolerated, nor 



changes be made from a mere desire of novelty. No ram's 



horns, and ammonites, should be substituted for volutes in an 



Ionic capital; no copies of natural objects should compose a 



work of decorative art ; and no borrowing from a design of a 



totally different character should be resorted to in order to 



make up a deficient corner. It should have one motive or 



intention throughout : — 



" servetur ad imum 

 Qalis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet ; 



and many an Horatian maxim laid down for poetry may well 

 be applied as a rule in aesthetic art. 



