Page:The Victorian Age.djvu/24

 great deal to him, and all of it was intolerable. He observed that the disappearance of beauty in human productions synchronised with the invention of machinery and the development of great industries, and he could not doubt that the two changes were interconnected. We sometimes forget that until the reign of George III a town was regarded as improving a landscape. A city was a glorious and beautiful thing, an object to be proud of. The hill of Zion is a fair place, the joy of the whole earth, because it had the holy city built upon it. Never since civilisation began has such ugliness been created as the modern English or American town. Ruskin saw in these structures a true index of the mind of their builders and inhabitants, and the sight filled him with horror. He read with entire approval what Plato wrote of industrialised Athens. 'The city of which we are speaking,' he says in the Laws, 'is some eighty furlongs from the sea. Then there is some hope that your citizens may be virtuous. Had you been on the sea, and well provided with