You may say:  May not a design satisfy all these logical conditions, and yet be cold and uninteresting, and give one no pleasure?  Certainly it may.  Indeed, we referred just now to that last element of beauty which is beyond analysis.  But, if we cannot analyze the result, I rather think we can express what it is which the designer must evince, beyond clear reasoning, to give the highest interest to his architecture.  He must have taken an interest in it himself.  That seems a little thing to say, but much lies in it.  As Matthew Arnold has said of poetry: 

    “What poets feel not, when they make
      A pleasure in creating,
    The world, in its turn, will not take
      Pleasure in contemplating.”

The truth runs through all art.  There are, alas, so many people who do not seem to have the faculty of taking pleasure, and there is so much architecture about our streets which it is impossible to suppose any one took “pleasure in creating.”  When a feature is put into a design, not because the designer liked it, but because it is the usual thing and it saves trouble, it always proclaims that melancholy truth.  But where something is designed because the designer liked doing it, and was trying to please his own fancy instead of copying what a hundred other men have done before, it will go hard but he will give some pleasure to the spectator.  It is from this blessed faculty that a design becomes inspired with what is best described as “character.”  It is not the same thing as style.  I have something to say in my next lecture as to what I think style means, but it is certain that a building may have style and yet want character, and it may have a good deal of character and yet be faulty or contradictory in style.  We cannot define “character,” but when we feel that it is present we may rely upon it that it is because the designer took interest and pleasure in his work, was not doing it merely scholastically—­in short, he put something of his own character into it, which means that he had some to put.

[Illustration:  Figs. 1 through 3]

Now, coming back to the axiom before mentioned, that architectural design should express and emphasize the practical requirements and physical conditions of the building, let us look a little more in detail into the manner in which this may be done.  We will take, to begin with, the very simplest structure we can possibly build—­a plain wall (Fig. 1).[2] Here there is no expression at all; only stones piled one on another, with sufficient care in coursing and jointing to give stability to the structure.  It is better for the wall, constructively, however, that it should have a wider base, to give it more solidity of foundation, and that the coping should project beyond the face of the wall, in order to throw the rain off, and these two requirements may be treated so as to give architectural expression to our work (Fig. 2).  It now consists of three distinct portions—­a