Custom has given its sanction to the use of shells in decorations: and is not there as much nature in them as in the Corinthian capital? You know its origin: a basket set upon the tomb of a young Corinthian girl, filled with some of her play-things, and covered with a large brick, being overgrown with the creeping branches of an acanthus, which had taken root under it, was the first occasion of forming that capital. _Callimachus_[64] the sculptor, surprized at the elegant simplicity of that composition, took thence a hint for enriching architecture with a new order. Thus this capital, destined to support all the entablature of the column, is but a basket of flowers; something so apparently inconsistent with the ideas of architecture, that there was no use made of it in the time of Pericles: for Pocock[65] thinks it strange that the temple of Minerva at Athens had Doric, instead of Corinthian pillars. But time soon changed this seeming oddity into nature; the basket lost, by custom, all its former offensiveness, and _Quod fuerat vitium desinit esse mora._ Ovid. Art. We acknowledge no Egyptian law to forbid arbitrary ornaments; and so fond have the artists of all ages been, both of the growth and form of shells, as to change even the chariot of Venus into an enormous one. The ancile, that Palladium of the Romans, was scooped into the form of a shell[66]: we find them on antique lamps[67]. Nay, nature herself seems to have produced their immense variety, and marvellous sinuations, for the benefit of the art. I have no mind to plead the bad cause of our unskilful decorators: only let me adduce the arguments used by a whole tribe, (if the artists will forgive the term), in order to prove the reasonableness of their art. The painters and sculptors of Paris, endeavouring to deprive the decorators of the title of artists, by alledging that they employed neither their own intellectual faculties, nor those of the connoisseurs, upon works not produced by nature, but rather the offsprings of capricious art; the others are said to have defended themselves in the following manner: “We are the followers of nature: like the bark of a tree, variously carved, our decorations grow into various forms: then art joins sportive nature, and corrects her: we do what the ancients did: consult their decorations.” Variety is the great and only rule to which decorators submit. Perceiving that there is no perfect resemblance between two things in nature, they likewise forsake it in their decorations; and careless of anxious twining, leave it to the parts themselves to find their like, as the atoms of Epicurus did. This liberty we owe to the very nation, which, after having nobly exceeded all the narrow bounds of social formalities, bestows so much pains upon communicating her improvements to her neighbours. This style in decorations got the epithet of _Barroque_ taste, derived from a word signifying pearls and teeth of unequal size[68].