We have thus completed the list of the materials of architectural decoration, and the reader may be assured that no effort has ever been successful to draw elements of beauty from any other sources than these. Such an effort was once resolutely made. It was contrary to the religion of the Arab to introduce any animal form into his ornament; but although all the radiance of color, all the refinements of proportion, and all the intricacies of geometrical design were open to him, he could not produce any noble work without an _abstraction_ of the forms of leafage, to be used in his capitals, and made the ground plan of his chased ornament. But I have above noted that coloring is an entirely distinct and independent art; and in the "Seven Lamps" we saw that this art had most power when practised in arrangements of simple geometrical form: the Arab, therefore, lay under no disadvantage in coloring, and he had all the noble elements of constructive and proportional beauty at his command: he might not imitate the sea-shell, but he could build the dome. The imitation of radiance by the variegated voussoir, the expression of the sweep of the desert by the barred red lines upon the wall, the starred inshedding of light through his vaulted roof, and all the endless fantasy of abstract line,[69] were still in the power of his ardent and fantastic spirit. Much he achieved; and yet in the effort of his overtaxed invention, restrained from its proper food, he made his architecture a glittering vacillation of undisciplined enchantment, and left the lustre of its edifices to wither like a startling dream, whose beauty we may indeed feel, and whose instruction we may receive, but must smile at its inconsistency, and mourn over its evanescence. FOOTNOTES: [63] The admiration of Canova I hold to be one of the most deadly symptoms in the civilisation of the upper classes in the present century. [64] Thus above, I adduced for the architect's imitation the appointed stories and beds of the Matterhorn, not its irregular forms of crag or fissure. [65] Appendix 21, "Ancient Representations of Water." [66] By the friend to whom I owe Appendix 21. [67] One is glad to hear from Cuvier, that though dolphins in general are "les plus carnassiers, et proportion gardée avec leur taille, les plus cruels de l'ordre;" yet that in the Delphinus Delphis, "tout l'organisation de son cerveau annonce _qu'il ne doit pas être dépourvu de la docilité_ qu'ils (les anciens) lui attribuaient." [68] Vide Wilkinson, vol. v., woodcut No. 478, fig. 8. The tamarisk appears afterwards to have given the idea of a subdivision of leaf more pure and quaint than that of the acanthus. Of late our botanists have discovered, in the "Victoria regia" (supposing its blossom reversed), another strangely beautiful type of what we may perhaps hereafter find it convenient to call _Lily_ capitals.