Well: on that it all turns. For those who will not learn to carve or
paint, and think themselves greater men because they cannot, it is
wholly wasted time to read any words of mine; in the truest and
sternest sense they can read no words of mine; for the most familiar I
can use--"form," "proportion," "beauty," "curvature," "colour"--are
used in a sense which by no effort I can communicate to such readers;
and in no building that I praise, is the thing that I praise it for,
visible to them.

And it is the more necessary for me to state this fully; because so-
called Gothic or Romanesque buildings are now rising every day around
us, which might be supposed by the public more or less to embody the
principles of those styles, but which embody not one of them, nor any
shadow or fragment of them; but merely serve to caricature the noble
buildings of past ages, and to bring their form into dishonour by
leaving out their soul.

The following addresses are therefore arranged, as I have just stated,
to put this great law, and one or two collateral ones, in less
mistakeable light, securing even in this irregular form at least
clearness of assertion. For the rest, the question at issue is not one
to be decided by argument, but by experiment, which if the reader is
disinclined to make, all demonstration must be useless to him.

The lectures are for the most part printed as they were read, mending
only obscure sentences here and there. The parts which were trusted to
extempore speaking are supplied, as well as I can remember (only with
an addition here and there of things I forgot to say), in the words, or
at least the kind of words, used at the time; and they contain, at all