ON THE BEAUTY OF NATURE. 255 
age and nation, all those old ones are not more or less 
beautiful. Most likely all the styles which are possible within 
the laws of mechanics and geometry have been exhausted, 
except mere monstrosities. And what is the consequence? 
Why, that we now recognise the beauty of them all, and do 
our best to imitate them, some persons preferring one and 
some another, either for different purposes or the same. A 
man would now be thought a fool who built a dwelling-house 
to imitate a Greek temple, as they did in all the Georgian 
period; and yet an equal fool to pronounce Greek temples ugly. 
‘Two centuries ago, and less, writers who knew no better wrote 
of all the great medizeval styles, which are collectively called 
Gothic, as “obsolete”? and “modern” and contemptible, 
just because the renaissance of the classical styles was then 
in fashion. But the natural instincts of mankind returned 
upon them, and before the end of the last century they began 
to see that mere ignorance had led those writers to condemn 
what they only did not understand. Moreover, religious pre- 
judices had much to do with it. In all northern Europe, 
though not in Italy, where the classic St. Peter’s had been 
built with the “ indulgences’ which caused the Reformation, 
the style of the old abbeys was associated with Popery against 
Protestantism. By degrees that delusion vanished, and then 
people began to see that both the great styles of architecture 
have peculiar beauties of their own, against which all that can 
be said is that they refuse to mix. At least, all the attempts 
of architects a few years ago to make an eclectic style out of 
classical and Gothic were miserable failures, though all the 
five Gothic styles mix well enough, as nearly every cathedral 
tells us. It is much like the case of animals which will not 
breed outside of their own species, but will freely within iv. 
I have said more than I need to answer the only attempt 
that I have ever been able to meet with from any of the 
deniers of design in nature to account for the enormous pre- 
ponderance:of beauty over ugliness that prevails throughout 
nature, and even in things that are partly, if not wholly, 
artificial. It is plain that there are permanent or continually 
reviving instinctive tastes for beauty, which no argument can 
prove to be either right or wrong, but no temporary craze of 
fashion can get rid of or prevent from returning. Moreover, 
some of our tastes for beauty may be called latent, and ready 
to start into action whenever the proper object is presented 
to them by some law of nature which has never before had 
the opportunity of acting, so far as we can tell, but does act, 
the moment it is wanted, as promptly as gravity, which never 
sleeps, as the old saying is. I have already mentioned the 
