To complete the beauty of the court, massive corbels have been thrown out from the piers, upon which statues of the greatest and most famous men in science are to be, or are already, placed. These shafts and capitals and statues have been, in great part, the gift of individuals interested in the progress and successful completion of such a building. The Queen presented five of the statues; and her example has been followed by many of the graduates of the University and lovers of Art in England.
Mr. Ruskin ends his second letter in the little book before us with these words: "Although I doubt not that lovelier and juster expressions of the Gothic principle will be ultimately arrived at by us than any which are possible in the Oxford Museum, its builders will never lose their claim to our chief gratitude, as the first guides in a right direction; and the building itself, the first exponent of recovered truth, will only be the more venerated, the more it is excelled."
Such is the way in which Oxford, having a Museum to build, sets to work. She lays down a large and generous plan, and erects a building worthy of her ancient fame, worthy to increase the love and honor in which she is held,--a building that adds a new beauty to her old beauties of hall and chapel, of quadrangle and cloister. She does not mistake parsimony for economy; she does not neglect to regard the duty that lies upon her, as the guardian and instructress of youth, to set before their eyes models of fair proportion, noble structures which shall exercise at once an influence to refine the taste and the sentiment and to enlarge the intellect. She acknowledges the claims of the future as well as of the present, and does not erect that which the future, however it may advance in constructive power, will regard as base, mean, or ugly. She recognizes the value to herself, as well as to her sons, of all those associations which, through the power of her adorned and munificent architecture, shall bind them to her in ties of closer tenderness, and of strong, though most delicate feeling. Her building is to have an aspect that shall correspond to the nobility of its function,--that shall impress the student, as he walks along the hard and dry paths of science, with some sense, faint though it be, of the beauty of that learning which is furnished with so goodly an abode. The influence of a fine building, complete in all its parts, is one which cannot be estimated in money, cannot be investigated by any practical process, but which is nevertheless as strong and precious as it is secret, as constant as it is unobserved.
