§ II. There are, therefore, no ornaments more deeply suggestive in their simplicity than these alternate bars of horizontal colors; nor do I know any buildings more noble than those of the Pisan Romanesque, in which they are habitually employed; and certainly none so graceful, so attractive, so enduringly delightful in their nobleness. Yet, of this pure and graceful ornamentation, Professor Willis says, "a practice more destructive of architectural grandeur can hardly be conceived:" and modern architects have substituted for it the ingenious ornament of which the reader has had one specimen above, Fig. III., p. 61, and with which half the large buildings in London are disfigured, or else traversed by mere straight lines, as, for instance, the back of the Bank. The lines on the Bank may, perhaps, be considered typical of accounts; but in general the walls, if left destitute of them, would have been as much fairer than the walls charged with them, as a sheet of white paper is than the leaf of a ledger. But that the reader may have free liberty of judgment in this matter, I place two examples of the old and the Renaissance ornament side by side on the opposite page. That on the right is Romanesque, from St. Pietro of Pistoja; that on the left, modern English, from the Arthur Club-house, St. James's Street. § III. But why, it will be asked, should the lines which mark the division of the stones be wrong when they are chiselled, and right when they are marked by color? First, because the color separation is a natural one. You build with different kinds of stone, of which, probably, one is more costly than another; which latter, as you cannot construct your building of it entirely, you arrange in conspicuous bars. But the chiselling of the stones is a wilful throwing away of time and labor in defacing the building: it costs much to hew one of those monstrous blocks into shape; and, when it is done, the building is _weaker_ than it was before, by just as much stone as has been cut away from its joints. And, secondly, because, as I have repeatedly urged, straight lines are ugly things as _lines_, but admirable as limits of colored spaces; and the joints of the stones, which are painful in proportion to their regularity, if drawn as lines, are perfectly agreeable when marked by variations of hue.