or citadel, planted above the town on a commanding height, was not so necessary a feature as in the armed aristocracies of the invading Dorians; so that the sterner characteristics of the Doric type, intended to be seen from far, were softened down, and the small ornaments so magnified as to leave no great distinction between them and the main forms of the structure. Strong geometrical precision was abandoned, and the fancy of the architect allowed to run out into playful appendages, such as the volutes or ram's horns, and the swelling cushions, and the bases required to balance at the lower end of the column the effect of so large a projection in the capital; and all plain rectangular masses were broken up into a multiplicity of graceful mouldings. In short, if the Doric style had the expression of a great and grave man steadfastly employed in some weighty business, the Ionic may be imagined to represent the graces of a lovely woman, who refuses not to heighten by ornament the delicacy of her light figure. In after times, when the two great races had lost much of their distinctness, and the smaller states had been broken down and amalgamated into larger masses, a third order came into vogue, resulting from a combination of something of the strength and size of the first, with the luxuriant decorations of the second; and such was the Corinthian. Accordingly, it has neither majesty nor elegance, but richness; and was well suited to the age of Alexander and his successors; and afterwards, like the Asiatic style in oratory, acceptable to the Romans.

Here we see consistency and propriety still further sacrificed to effect, while the curvilinear forms of vegetable growth, suggested, perhaps, at first, by the crowns of green leaves wreathed round the capitals on festive days, were fixed and petrified in hard stone; in all other parts too, ornaments heaped upon ornaments, without any meaning, so as to produce an appearance of magnificence, delightful at first to the eye, but leaving no impression on the inward mind.

These three orders, significant of three very distinct ideas which prevailed among the different races of the Greeks, were, however, afterwards used indifferently by all, according as propriety might require; just as in Pindar we find the three moods of Dorian, Lydian and Æolian music adopted in dif

ferent odes, or different parts of the same ode, as the subject might require dignity and sedateness, or easy elegance, or a rich and Bacchanalian fancy. Thus, as Mr. Hope observes, to Zeus and Pallas, the pure offspring of his intellect, the temples would be built of the Doric style ;—

"while in the fanes of the gayer Apollo, the Bacchus of later date, and more luxurious habits, displaying more affinity to the female character, they might by preference employ the Ionic equally ambiguous; and the shrines of Venus might be marked by the order invented in the city where that goddess had her most beauteous and most celebrated priestesses. But still the Greeks reserved to themselves the right of giving to each forms more restricted or multiplied, more simple or rich, and proportions more sturdy or delicate, according to the peculiar exigences of the edifice or situation."

So that between each order and the two others, an almost insensible gradation exists,

"and the Doric of the temple of Neptune at Corinth, and that of Juno at Nemea, differ as much in their proportions as the statues of the Farnese Hercules and the Belvidere Apollo."-Page 40-43.

To sum up the result of this hasty sketch, we observe that the general expression of Grecian architecture was that of the completeness of a whole fully developed into all its parts, and the perfection of each part, and its due subordination to the whole; that, in short, of a real organized being in the fulness of its existence, and the justest balance of its faculties, and either worthily undergoing some heavy trial, or with temperate dignity enjoying a serene life. And this was exactly the character of Grecian ethics, which rested mainly on the idea of justice and harmony, or proportion; and according to which the subordination of the inferior faculties in the individual, and of the inferior individuals in the state, constituted their ideal of moral and political excellence. Now we cannot imagine that this coincidence between the forms of their masonry and their moral systems was caused by the want of glass, as some would tell us, or their ignorance of the arch, or the habit of living in the open air, and offering sacrifice before a statue. Such were, no doubt, the sine qua non, that without which it would never have come to pass, the material causes of their style of building, the causes of its rudest beginning; but how, in the name of possibility, of its highest form and completest development?

We do not mean to say that Mr. Hope has adopted such a degrading theory as that which we endeavour to controvert; his genius surely could not stoop so low. But the fact is, that in this learned and elaborate book of his, the general tendency of his observations is towards the material side of the question, and the moral habits of either ancients or moderns are seldom mentioned or alluded to as having anything to do with the business. As a zealous and accurate observer of the phenomena of history, he deserves all praise; and his knotty and contorted sentences, full of dense matter, will form valuable knee-timbers for the construction of some more ample theory. We wish to give the reader a general outline of his essay, which includes the whole history of European architecture, and its offspring the Mahometan; and we will therefore proceed to extract his account of the Roman and Byzantine styles.

"I have already alluded to the restricted span of architecture in stone while debarred the use of the arch,-to the vast new resources and powers derived from that discovery. Pillars and walls, placed so far asunder that no blocks of stone, no beams of wood can connect them, may by the arch be embraced and combined. An area so spacious that no flat ceiling could cover it, may by the vault be closed in with equal solidity and durability."-Page 62.

"Skill in mechanics is a faculty wholly distinct from taste in the fine arts;"-(we extract this sentence with peculiar pleasure) and hence it happened that the greater exigences of the Romans, in respect of architecture, the vaster buildings they had to raise and cover, soon made them develope all the superior powers of the arch.

"In their aqueducts, they multiplied this feature in a seemingly interminable series in their baths they gave it a prodigious continued elongation and span. Here over a cylindrical wall they turned concentric arches into a round cupola: there at the end of a square, or round a circular vacant space, they covered semicircles by semidomes. Sometimes they enclosed smaller in larger arches, or, giving to different individuals a different tendency, made them cross and form angles with others differently directed; the cupola itself was occasionally made polygonic. In general they avowed, they gloried in it, they made it the most conspicuous feature in their buildings; but at times, in the portico, and where they affected Græcism, they carried it from column to column in a covert way, under the concealment of a fictitious architrave. Everywhere, however, they made each individual curve describe that complete semicircle,

neither at its base elongated beyond, nor terminated short of, its full diameter; nor at its apex interrupted by, and meeting the opposite curve at an angle-a formation which is particularly distinguished for that solidity which the rulers of the eternal city, in every public building, seemed to make their principal object."-Page 63.

We must interrupt Mr. Hope for one moment, to observe that this form of arch is not, we believe, distinguished from some others by any greater real solidity, however much it may have the external character and formal appearance of that quality.

"This universal adaptation of a more varied developement gave to Roman architecture, from the first, an internal principle of construction, and an external corresponding feature, which caused a departure from the elementary model of the Greeks, in reality, in its essence more important, more fundamental, than that which the style since called Gothic exhibited in descent from the manner of the Romans. Once admitted into Roman edifices, it soon began to acquire a prevalence inconsistent with the existence of the essential parts of the Grecian architecture, which were henceforward considered as optional and ornamental expletives and additions. The unbending straightness of the architrave, and the arch curvetting from support to support, the roof with sloping sides, and the rounded cupola, could not subsist together, be seen in the same place, at least as parts equally important. Thence the Romans, had they been possessed of a delicate appreciation of the beauties of art, had they been gifted with inventive or imaginative genius, would for their arch have devised some new species of ornamental addition, appearing to belong to its nature and composition. But such powers they could not boast. Their minds might be fertile in useful inventions: in those calculated for beauty they were sterile."-Page 64.

Hence the forms of Grecian architecture became completely bastardized and degenerate in their hands.

"In the former, the column was a more characteristic and essential feature than the wall, since it supported a greater proportion of the weight, seemed rooted in the deep recesses of the soil like the oak in its native forest, and rose in single stem, continuous in substance and robust in frame, from the surface of the earth to the entablature. . . . . In the latter, a continuous wall, capable not only of supporting great perpendicular weight, but of enduring considerable oblique pressure, was an indispensable requisite for the continuous vault, and naturally became an object of greater consequence and attention than columns. These, indeed, needed only to adorn its nakedness, placed too far from the main building to be embodied with it or to add to its strength, instead of rising directly from the plynth or stylobate, were separated from it, and raised upon a clumsy square block, which, under the name of pedestal, seemed interposed to interrupt the connection between the shaft and the floor;

by its size to narrow the passage, and by its protruding angles to inconvenience or to hurt the passengers. Frequently, as in the triumphal arches of the emperors, that pedestal became so lofty that, instead of raising the columns on a sort of cothurnus, it lifted them on a positive stilt, and made them appear as if tottering in the air. As they became weaker, like the limbs of an unhealthy child, they were stretched to a greater distance from each other, and were no longer capable of bearing an entablature, diminished to their own proportions. In order fully to confirm their inutility, they were not made to carry any such, but of an architrave supported by the wall itself, such projections or knobs as did not exceed their own diameter. The effect produced was that of a second capital mimicking the first; confusing its form, and destroying its appearance; causing as great a multiplication of breaks and angles, and of clumsy mouldings, as arises from the equally useless pedestal underneath.”Page 70.

Here, then, we see a style of art, like the period of society and civilization which produced it, and whose likeness it was, becoming effete and barren, everything dying, decaying, corrupting, on the solemn and pompous death-bed of the Roman empire. Here is an example of what the art would be, were it nothing more than mechanical, meant nothing more than to make for us comfortable, durable and eye-pleasing receptacles. Eternal glory and heartfelt thanks to the Providence and the Power that made beginning of a new and better cycle! To this we gladly hasten.

"If," says Mr. Hope, "the form of the primitive Grecian hut was disregarded in the heathen temples of Rome, we may suppose that in its Christian churches, required to be of dimensions wholly incompatible with that form, built in a hurry out of incongruous materials, which it was only wished to combine in the readiest way possible, and in which a professed imitation of an edifice destined for idolatrous purposes would rather be avoided than sought, every remaining trace became obliterated. And so it happened; for though columns of different temples, originally unequal in height, might be brought to the same level by shortening those found too long, and by eking out, with a second base or a pedestal those found too short, their various entablatures could not be thus adjusted over their capitals. The last representation of the transverse beam was altogether laid aside, and small arches, with imposts bearing immediately on the capitals of the columns, were made to tie together all those of the same row. In most other respects the church of St. Peter, St. Paul, and all the others built under Theodosius, retained, with the name, the features of the Basilica only so modified as the exigences of Christian worship required."-Page 90.

Mr. Hope then, at some length, describes the ancient Ba