To a certain extent this more philosophical ornament was doubtless imitated; and I have remarked elsewhere on the highly heraldic lions which even the Saracens carved over the gate of St.Stephen.
But it is the extraordinary and even exasperating fact that it was not imitated as the most meaningless sort of modern vulgarity is imitated.
King Richard's great red hat embroidered with beasts and birds has not overshadowed the earth so much as the billycock, which no one has yet thought of embroidering with any such natural and universal imagery.
The cockney tourist is not only more likely to set out with the intention of knocking them, but he has actually knocked them; and Orientals are imitating the tweeds of the tourist more than they imitated the stripes of the squire.

It is a curious and perhaps melancholy truth that the world is imitating our worst, our weariness and our dingy decline, when it did not imitate our best and the high moment of our morning.
Perhaps it is only when civilisation becomes a disease that it becomes an infection.

Possibly it is only when it becomes a very virulent disease that it becomes an epidemic.

Possibly again that is the meaning both of cosmopolitanism and imperialism.
Anyhow the tribes sitting by Afric's sunny fountains did not take up the song when Francis of Assisi stood on the very mountain of the Middle Ages, singing the Canticle of the Sun.
When Michael Angelo carved a statue in snow, Eskimos did not copy him, despite their large natural quarries or resources.
Laplanders never made a model of the Elgin Marbles, with a frieze of reindeers instead of horses; nor did Hottentots try to paint Mumbo Jumbo as Raphael had painted Madonnas.

But many a savage king has worn a top-hat, and the barbarian has sometimes been so debased as to add to it a pair of trousers.