"This architects peremptorily assert is the only rule, nor dare they deviate from the established orders. Should you press them hard for a reason, they will tell you no man has yet been able to equal what has been already done; which though I admit, yet have I ventured to assert, and now repeat, that the most beautiful order in the architecture of the ancients will perfectly agree with the rules of composition laid down in the Analysis, and that new orders, adapted to various purposes, may be still invented. I cannot help thinking it is possible that a man who understood drawing, though he had never seen a column, might, by applying the straight and waving line, and correcting simplicity by variety, produce one with equal beauty to any of them.
"In architecture, after FITNESS hath been strictly and geometrically complied with, all the additional members or parts may, by attention to the proper rules of composition, be continually varied and yet be pleasing. For example, if the capitals composed of the confined shapes of hats and wigs can be rendered tolerable, what might not be done by selecting the elegant varieties which are displayed in feathers, flowers, shells, etc.?"[57]
ROUND AND SQUARE HEADS.
SQUARE & ROUND HEADS.
The five heads in the annexed plate are copied from sketches in my possession, and all of them seem to have been intended for the illustration of his Analysis, in which he remarks, that "the particular expressions of a face or movement of a feature which becomes one person shall be disagreeable in another, just as such expressions or turns happen to fall in with the lines of beauty or the reverse; for this reason there are pretty frowns and disagreeable smiles: the lines that form a pleasing smile about the corners of the mouth have gentle windings, as fig. 1,[58] but lose their beauty in the full laugh; the expression of excessive laughter, oftener than any other, gives a sensible face a silly or disagreeable look, as it is apt to form regular plain lines about the mouth (like a parenthesis), which sometimes appear like crying."
"In what we call plain lines there is this constant and remarkable effect, that as they are more or less conspicuous in any kind of character or expression in the face, they bring along with them certain degrees of a foolish or a ridiculous aspect. The inimitable Butler knew this, and describes the beard of Hudibras, fig. 2:
'In cut and dye so like a tile,