228 ON TASTE IN ORNAMENTAL DESIGN. Past II. 



know how the conventional is to be derived, how varied, 

 from the natural ; and when this is well understood it will be 

 easy for them to introduce variations of conventional foliage 

 without depending solely on oft-repeated designs, or the 

 commonplace imitation of natural flowers. It was the 

 hackneyed repetition of old and ill understood types which 

 was so injurious to architectural ornamentation in the latter 

 periods of the Roman Empire, when a continual departure 

 from the original had debased the acanthus of the Corinthian 

 capital, and other forms, so as to leave in them little resem- 

 blance either to the original foliage, or the conventional sub- 

 stitute ; and a thorough knowledge of the principles on which 

 ornament is formed is necessary to prevent the common error 

 of introducing it without a reason, and in some position to 

 which it is unsuited. 



The choice of an appropriate ornament should always be 

 matter of primary consideration in architecture, as in every 

 decorative art ; and we should have no melange of the pin- 

 nacle and the tea-urn, as an ornament on the summit of a 

 balustrade before the roof of a house ; no huge stone bullets 

 poised on a gate-post ; no vases for chimney-pots ; and no 

 mock trophies in stone, or plaster, commemorating no triumph, 

 but merely hiding a blank wall. Nor should any one sup- 

 pose that the adoption of a caprice is to be sanctioned by 

 antiquity ; and if the Etruscans placed the heads of horses, 

 as well as of men, over a gateway, as at Perugia, or if the 

 beaks of ships sprouting out of a column were thought 

 worthy of being a Eoman monument, we should avoid such 

 caprices as carefully as any of modern times. 



34. [A glaring inappropriateness of subjects to particular 

 materials and to particular places is observable in the silver 

 ornaments of our dinner tables and their plateaus. Here, in 

 our massive and costly centres, and other pieces of decora- 

 tive plate, instead of figures gracefully grouped to form a 



