be made by every one. Hence he was led to the formulation of his celebrated rule—a rule that, as he said without boasting, will fit everybody; "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." There is no more brilliant example of a rule that is at once completely universal in its scope, and completely certain in its application.
"To my mind," he says in another lecture, "it is only here and there (out of the kitchen) that you can find in a well-to-do house things that are of any use at all." By this accumulation of useless things not only are beautiful things kept out, but the very sense of beauty is perpetually dulled and ground away. If this pressure were once removed—so at least he thought, and it can hardly be considered an Utopian belief—the natural sense of beauty would slowly begin to recover itself, and at last the house that had in it nothing but what was known to be useful would come to have in it nothing but what was really beautiful; the mistaken or bewildered belief in the beauty of ugly things would disappear, and with the dwindling demand for them they would gradually cease to be produced, and fade away bit by bit out of the world.
Closely connected with this doctrine was his second cardinal axiom: "No work which cannot be done with pleasure in the doing is worth doing." That "natural aptitude for his work so strong that no education can force him away from his special bent" was a quality in him which he could not believe to be unique or even peculiar. "I tried to think what would happen to me," he says in another lecture, that entitled "The Prospects of Architecture in Civilization," "if I were forbidden my ordinary daily work; and I knew that I should die of despair and weariness. It was clear to me that I
