§ XV. I conclude, then, with the reader's leave, that all ornament is base which takes for its subject human work, that it is utterly base,--painful to every rightly-toned mind, without perhaps immediate sense of the reason, but for a reason palpable enough when we _do_ think of it. For to carve our own work, and set it up for admiration, is a miserable self-complacency, a contentment in our own wretched doings, when we might have been looking at God's doings. And all noble ornament is the exact reverse of this. It is the expression of man's delight in God's work. § XVI. For observe, the function of ornament is to make you happy. Now in what are you rightly happy? Not in thinking of what you have done yourself; not in your own pride, not your own birth; not in your own being, or your own will, but in looking at God; watching what He does, what He is; and obeying His law, and yielding yourself to His will. You are to be made happy by ornaments; therefore they must be the expression of all this. Not copies of your own handiwork; not boastings of your own grandeur; not heraldries; not king's arms, nor any creature's arms, but God's arm, seen in His work. Not manifestation of your delight in your own laws, or your own liberties, or your own inventions; but in divine laws, constant, daily, common laws;--not Composite laws, nor Doric laws, nor laws of the five orders, but of the Ten Commandments. § XVII. Then the proper material of ornament will be whatever God has created; and its proper treatment, that which seems in accordance with or symbolical of His laws. And, for material, we shall therefore have, first, the abstract lines which are most frequent in nature; and then, from lower to higher, the whole range of systematised inorganic and organic forms. We shall rapidly glance in order at their kinds; and, however absurd the elemental division of inorganic matter by the ancients may seem to the modern chemist, it is one so grand and simple for arrangements of external appearances, that I shall here follow it; noticing first, after abstract lines, the imitable forms of the four elements, of Earth, Water, Fire, and Air, and then those of animal organisms. It may be convenient to the reader to have the order stated in a clear succession at first, thus:-- 1. Abstract lines. 2. Forms of Earth (Crystals). 3. Forms of Water (Waves). 4. Forms of Fire (Flames and Rays). 5. Forms of Air (Clouds). 6. (Organic forms.) Shells. 7. Fish. 8. Reptiles and insects. 9. Vegetation (A.) Stems and Trunks. 10. Vegetation (B.) Foliage. 11. Birds. 12. Mammalian animals and Man.