the natural scenery of their country."

What, then, about the plaid? Where is the natural fact there? If the
Indian, by practising a non-natural art of spirals and zig-zags, cuts
himself off "from all possible sources of healthy knowledge or natural
delight," to what did the good and healthy Highlander condemn himself by
practising the art of the plaid? A spiral may be found in the vine, and
a zig-zag in the lightning, but where in nature is the plaid to be found?
There is surely no curve or curl that can be drawn by a designing hand
but is a play upon some infinitely various natural fact. The smoke of
the cigarette, more sensitive in motion than breath or blood, has its
waves so multitudinously inflected and reinflected, with such flights and
such delays, it flows and bends upon currents of so subtle influence and
impulse as to include the most active, impetuous, and lingering curls
ever drawn by the finest Oriental hand--and that is not a Hindu hand, nor
any hand of Aryan race. The Japanese has captured the curve of the
section of a sea-wave--its flow, relaxation, and fall; but this is a
single movement, whereas the line of cigarette-smoke in a still room
fluctuates in twenty delicate directions. No, it is impossible to accept
the saying that the poor spiral or scroll of a human design is anything
but a participation in the innumerable curves and curls of nature.

Now the plaid is not only "cut off" from natural sources, as Ruskin says
of Oriental design--the plaid is not only cut off from nature, and cut
off from nature by the yard, for it is to be measured off in inorganic
quantity; but it is even a kind of intentional contradiction of all
natural or vital forms. And it is equally defiant of vital tone and of
vital colour. Everywhere in nature tone is gradual, and between the
fainting of a tone and the failing of a curve there is a charming
analogy. But the tartan insists that its tone shall be invariable, and