[165] In heartfelt trust Johannes Mooter and Maria Rubi had this house erected.  May dear God shield us from all perils and misfortune; and let His blessing rest upon it during the journey through this wretched life up to heavenly Paradise where the pious dwell.  There will God reward them with the Crown of Peace to all eternity.

[166] Baptistery of Pisa, circular, of marble, with dome two hundred feet high, embellished with numerous columns, is a notable work of the twelfth century.  The pulpit is a masterpiece of Nicola Pisano.  Casa d’Oro at Venice is noted for its elegance.  It was built in the fourteenth century.  The Cathedral of Lisieux dates chiefly from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and contains many works of art.  The Palais de Justice is of the fifteenth century.  It was built for the Parliament of the Province.

  [167] This cathedral, destroyed in 1799, was one of the most
  beautiful in all Normandy.

  [168] Dante.

THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE

It has been my endeavour to show in the preceding pages how every form of noble architecture is in some sort the embodiment of the Polity, Life, History, and Religious Faith of nations.  Once or twice in doing this, I have named a principle to which I would now assign a definite place among those which direct that embodiment; the last place, not only as that to which its own humility would incline, but rather as belonging to it in the aspect of the crowning grace of all the rest; that principle, I mean, to which Polity owes its stability, Life its happiness, Faith its acceptance, Creation its continuance,—­Obedience.

Nor is it the least among the sources of more serious satisfaction which I have found in the pursuit of a subject that at first appeared to bear but slightly on the grave interests of mankind, that the conditions of material perfection which it leads me in conclusion to consider, furnish a strange proof how false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty:  most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible.  There is no such thing in the universe.  There can never be.  The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.

In one of the noblest poems[169] for its imagery and its music belonging to the recent school of our literature, the writer has sought in the aspect of inanimate nature the expression of that Liberty which, having once loved, he had seen among men in its true dyes of darkness.  But with what strange fallacy of interpretation! since in one noble line of his invocation he has contradicted the assumptions of the rest, and acknowledged the presence of a subjection, surely not less severe because eternal.  How could he otherwise? since if there be any one principle more widely than another confessed by every utterance, or more sternly than another imprinted on every atom, of the visible creation, that principle is not Liberty, but Law.