Many people imagine that the merit of old oak is its ugliness, and that if you clap a grinning lion's head upon the corner of your table, or a griffin upon a garden seat, you will render it more valuable - in fact, 'Early English.' But the popular lion's head hails from imperial Rome, where it had a real significance. Used as we use it, however, it is for the most part neither valuable nor pleasing. There is an incongruity in placing such an object among the hyper-refined luxuries of an English drawing-room, which has no associations with the arena, and no delight in beast-fights. It is foolish, therefore ignoble. And the 'ignoble grotesque' which Mr. Ruskin has so often and so vehemently condemned is the outcome of affected taste and false feeling, whilst influencing in no wholesome degree, if at all, the moods and ideas of those to whom it pretends to be an aesthetic aid.

Where the mediaeval artist placed it, as a gargoyl or bracket outside the cathedral, the grotesque figure had a meaning and a beautiful one. It was the image of evil and of folly which our better moods might cast out. Or it indicated the amusing and pardonable side of human weakness not all bad. Only when the religious sense in art was confused or crushed by pagan ideas (which in their native places had had some significance), did the hideous masks of beasts or demons begin to haunt our walls, our chairs, our beds, our very backs, plates, pots, trinkets, in thoughtless and meaningless profusion.

And when such masks and beasts come to be manufactured hastily and by steam, not only without any strength of imagery, but without the most rudimentary anatomical knowledge, the result is ugly without being instructive, or even amusing. So vegetation that ends in beasts, beasts that end in vegetation, are a class of ornamentation which requires genius to make it graceful and handwork to make it interesting; and at its best - when good enough, that is, not to annoy the eye - it should be sufficiently diminutive not to attract it.