laborious art; and we must endeavour to discover and bring to light, first in ourselves the unity of one consistent personal being, and then without us that of the one creation of the one God. For our senses do exist and must exist, and if not conciliated they will rebel. Nor can we think that, for instance, during divine service in our churches, these same senses are either kept under, or drawn upwards, by being presented with blank white-washed walls, new bonnets, or perchance the effigy of a lion and unicorn, instead of the cross and suffering Saviour, and all the majestic imagery which our ancestors loved to behold! We can pray without them; who doubts it? as we can live without good furniture or handsome rooms, or any of the ornaments of civilization; with unplaned doors like Spartans, or with no doors at all like Epictetus. But if we do not live so in private, but are driven by a strong instinct of our nature to make every little thing about us in our domestic life, an image, and as it were a forget-me-not memorial of elegance and dignity, why should we leave these out in the noblest of our performances, and consecrate to God rusticity only? It is not found necessary for us, in order to love our wives and children, or to transact business, or to perform any other function of humanity, that we should go into a barn or a hut. Nor, indeed, are the feelings ever so divisible from the imaginary power that they can be affected directly by abstract truth; if it were so, then, to be consistent, we should strip our service as well as our churches of all ornament, and cut down florid sermons into mere assertions and naked syllogisms. Perhaps therefore we are not so enlightened as we think ourselves in reversing the order of things, according to which, in old times, private houses were small and rude, but public buildings of a size and grandeur proportionate to the full stature of the whole state.

These thoughts naturally occur to one in reviewing the History of Architecture; for we find that Art, in so far as it can be entitled a fine art, to have been developed in all former times in the construction of temples and churches, while mere house-building was thought a branch as inferior to it, as the portrait is to the historic painting. For a house must always be an affair of mere convenience and habitability; and what, in the higher style, a great authoress has termed " cette grande

inutilité" of all that excites the imaginative intellect, becomes when applied to such structures impertinent and absurd. But our practice works upon our theory, and we are not content now unless we can draw down all the imposing and humiliating grandeur of the past to our own level. We find accordingly that the writers of the present day would reduce the art altogether to a mere mechanical one; a sort of boxmaking, only on a larger scale. Of all the arts, indeed, Architecture is by its own nature that which appears the most unsettled in its principles, from the ambiguous position it holds between the lower and operative class of arts, and the fine ones. As to Music, Painting, and the rest, no one can help admitting, with however bad a grace, that they lie beyond the jurisdiction of the understanding, and that beauty, feeling, or something of the kind, is what regulates the genius that produces and the critic that judges. But when we come to Architecture, the utilitarians, accompanied by a formidable set of carpenters, bricklayers and upholsterers, make claim to her as a runaway slave from their territory; stone, wood, convenience and ingenuity being in their notion the only postulates required for building. It is but fair to hear what can be said on their side of the question, especially when we find a man of such genius as Mr. Hope giving some kind of countenance to it.

"In every country," says this thoughtful author, "we find "the style of building determined by the nature of the soil, "and the habits of the people consequent thereupon. In "China, for instance, the taper conic form which prevails in "all edifices, and the slight and slender character, what is it "but an imitation on wood of the canvass dwellings of the "original Monguls? while in Hindustan and Egypt, alluvial "plains, subject to inundation, the early inhabitants, obliged "to keep to the highlands, and store their food in caves, "made their buildings afterwards to suit their habits of lifegloomy, massy, cavernous. Thus too the Scythians, who "roamed the Dodonæan forests in the North of Greece, from "their very way of life, and the materials within their reach, "could construct no other habitation for themselves but the "wooden hut, with upright posts and transverse rafters, and sloping roof. In later ages again, nothing but the practical

"conveniences afforded by the use of the arch, and the in"vention of glass, for the enclosing of large spaces, and the "want of such enclosures for religious processions in an in"clement climate, and the necessity of a high-pitched roof to "throw off snow, determined the form and construction of "the so-called gothic."

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Now all this we willingly subscribe to, provided the other side of the question be not excluded. We admit these determining causes, but as material, not formal causes. if this were all-if there were nothing more in the art than the adaptation of means to ends, the ingenuity of man in procuring gratification for his wants, and the gradual improvement of mechanical contrivance, the history of it might perhaps be interesting, but not more so than that of ship-building or iron-founding, and not particularly to the man of taste more than to any one else. But now the fact is, that it does particularly interest that particular class, and this fact must be accounted for. What then is the general distinction between the two classes of Arts? This evidently, that the one requires nothing more than ingenuity, and is the product of only one particular faculty of man, the understanding, quite independent of his moral nature; whereas the other and higher sort call into action the whole man, and their works are consequently stamped with the image of the collective fulness of his being, and though still constructions of the ingenious animal, are presided over by moral ideas. The utility of a thing is its utility, and its beauty is its beauty, nor can we by any juggling equation get rid of either term, or make one stand for both. Now a thing is useful only relatively, in relation to something else, taken together with which it makes a whole, in itself being only a part; though the very same thing, if considered by itself as one distinct thing, that is, a partial whole, may be called beautiful; the beauty of it being its wholeness, unity and independence. Nothing, however, is truly a whole, or essentially one and self-sufficient, but a being or person having life in itself; and all other things can have but a shadowy resemblance of this perfection. So that the beauty of all material objects must be merely symbolical, and can be in them only so far as they represent, in forms of time and space, those things which primarily and

originally have their being in living souls; but which, in this, our earthly consciousness, cannot, perhaps, be seen intuitively in their essences, but are only known and deduced from their effects. We hold, then, that the beauty of a straight line, for instance, is its rectitude, that unswerving energy by which it maintains one constant direction; and the beauty of a circle, the union of infinite different tendencies in one harmonious whole, by one presiding determination; and so on of all other shapes.

These primary symbols we would call pure material beauty, and any others that may be found in the concrete forms of real things, relative or applied beauty; making a distinction similar to that between the pure and the applied sciences. All beauty, then, is an outward expression of inward good; and either of that which is good for all soul as soul in itself, and exercising its two prime faculties of expansion and concentration, of grandeur and harmony, or else of what is good for the individual being in particular forms of life. Consequently, the highest beauty of individual things is exhibited, when the thing is such as to be susceptible of the most intimate combination with the most universal forms. According to such views we would lay down this definition, that the art of so treating objects as to give them a moral significance, is the fine art. As in arithmetic, the fractional numbers must be reduced to relative unity with some one whole before they can be managed; so, we affirm, must the partial existences of the visible world be brought to a kind of common denomination with those of the inner world, before they can be available as expressions, to use another mathematical term, of beauty; and be the thing a, b or c, we believe, that by skilful treatment of its form, it may be brought to have such a meaning.

To apply these more general considerations to Architecture, we must begin with some real individual existence in the world, which expresses its own nature in its necessary form; and then observe how, in the course of time, the nature of the thing, acting as it were from within, and the visible form from without, work reciprocally upon each other till they reach an equilibrium in their highest possible development. The structure of the Grecian temple was determined

in all its forms by the nature of the materials used, and the climate. Cylindrical smooth trunks, found in the sheltered interior of woods, were fixed in the ground at equal distances, tied together lengthwise by beams laid along their tops, and cross-wise again by rafters laid over these from side to side; above which a roof, not like that of the orientals, flat, but sloping towards either side, and terminating in two triangular gables; and along the inner side of the posts a continuous. wall of clay or wicker-work. The only beauty or formal expression of which such a structure was susceptible lay in the contrast of the vertical lines of the supporters with the horizontal supported, the round and the rectangular, both heightened, probably, by dark and light colours; and in the symmetry, that is, the simplicity and sameness of the ratio between the different dimensions, both of the whole and of the separate parts. Afterwards, when the consecrated form came to be represented in the marble of Lower Greece, a new element was introduced, namely, the proportion between the strength of columns and the weight of superincumbent mass which they sustained, for as the columns were set closer, and made shorter and stouter, and the weight of masonry placed on them greater, the character of firmness, constancy and endurance was increased, or, vice versá, diminished.

Such was the general form, varying, of course, according to the genius of particular races. That style which was most straightforward and simple, and true to the lineaments of its wooden type; in which the parts were not softened away and blended together by gentle intermediaries, but large and strongly marked, and decisively separated; in which the mass supported was nearly equal to that of the supporters,—became the established national form among the friends and descendants of Hercules. In this the few ornaments admitted were very fine and minute, and, like a delicate fringe, not seen at any distance, but so placed as to entertain the beholder when immediately under the building, when the eye could not take in the general outline, or the majesty of the bolder parts. Not so grave and serious, but more graceful and refined, the Ionians, on the delightful sea-coast of Asia Minor, did not feel inclined to separate so strictly the essentials and the accessories. Besides, in their settlements, the Acropolis