The second law excludes licentiousness; nay circumscribes the architect and decorator within much narrower limits than the painter; who sometimes must, in spite of reason, subject his own fancy, and Greece, to fashion, even in history-pieces: but publick buildings, and such works as are made for futurity, claim decorations that will outlast the whims of fashion; like those that, by their dignity and superior excellence, bore down the attacks of many a century: otherwise they fade away, grow insipid and out of fashion, perhaps before the finishing of the very work to which they are added. The former law directs the artist to allegory: the latter to the imitation of antiquity; and this concerns chiefly the smaller decorations. Such I call those that make not up of themselves a whole, or those that are additional to the larger ones. The ancients never applied shells, when not required by the fable; as in the case of Venus and the Tritons; or by the place, as in the temples of Neptune: and lamps decked with shells[302] are supposed to have made part of the implements of those temples. For the same reason they may give lustre; and be very significant, in proper places; as in the festoons of the Stadthouse at Amsterdam[303]. Sheep and ox-heads stripped of their skin, so far from justifying a promiscuous use of shells, as the author seems inclined to think, are plain arguments to the contrary: for they not only were relative to the ancient sacrifices, but were thought to be endowed with a power of averting lightning[304]; and Numa pretended to have been secretly instructed about them by Jupiter[305]. Nor can the Corinthian capital serve for an instance of a seemingly absurd ornament, authorised and rendered fashionable by time alone: for it seems of an origin more natural and reasonable than Vitruvius makes it; which is, however, an enquiry more adapted to a treatise on architecture. Pocock believed that the Corinthian order had not much reputation in the time of Pericles, who built a temple to Minerva: but he should have been reminded, that the Doric order belonged to the temples of that goddess, as Vitruvius informs us[306]. These decorations ought to be treated like architecture in general, which owes its grandeur to simplicity, to a system of few parts, which being not complex themselves, branch out into grace and splendour. Remember here the channelled pillars of the temple of Jupiter, at Agrigentum, (Girgenti now) which were large enough to contain, in one single gutter, a man at full length[307]. In the same manner these decorations must not only be few, but those must likewise consist of few parts, which are to appear with an air of grandeur and ease. The first law (to return to allegory) might be lengthened out into many a subaltern rule: but the nature of things and circumstances is, and ever must be, the artist’s first aim; as for examples, refutation promises rather more instruction than authority.