tively early stage. In the graceful temples and porticos of Athens we discover the refinement of taste and intellect which continued to sway the world long after Greece had lost her freedom. In the amphitheatres, the aqueducts, the paved ways and palaces of Rome, we perceive the peculiar vastness of conception which rendered Rome, whether republic or empire, for so many ages the mistress of the world. In the Gothic temples of the Christian religion, with their long succession of pointed arches, gradually diminishing in the distance and creating shadows which enhance the apparent vastness of the whole, we trace the influence of the Northern worshipper, to whom the vistas formed by the interarching trees of his forest seemed the only suitable temple to the invisible Deity whom even in his heathen days he adored. The mediæval architecture of England and France tells of the feudal system where chief warred on chief and baron on baron; and the fortress-like palaces of some of the Italian cities speak more strongly than history itself of the days when those communities were torn by perpetual intestine conflict. Although architecture in its general sense, as denoting the art of construction, had undoubtedly its origin in the earliest necessities of human life, yet, considered as a fine art, it cannot be said to exist until a nation has arrived at a degree of opulence and luxury sufficient to accustom it to consider not only the ordinary necessities of shelter from the elements and defence against outside enemies, but also to adopt fixed principles founded on æsthetic rules of proportion, suitability, and beauty. For these reasons, architecture, as an art, was usually one of the latest developed among the great nations of the earth, and has adopted various forms which render it in many respects the exponent of the origin, civilization, and social institutions of the various nations in which it has been developed. The states of life into which mankind was originally distributed-those of hunters, shepherds, and tillers of the groundmay be said to have furnished the fundamental ideas of which modern architecture is the type. As the increase of nations and the rise of wars and tumults necessitated the study of means of defence, a fourth element was added. The hunter, at first dwelling in the clefts of the rock, in time learned to hew out from its sides substantial and comfortable dwellings, such as are still found among the ruins of Idumea, where abode the descendants of a mighty hunter. The shepherd, wandering from spot to spot in search of pasture for his flocks and herds, invented the tent, for which the hides of his cattle furnished the material, and which could be transported with him in his nomadic life. The tent, as will hereafter be observed, is still, more or less, the architectural type of the Semitic races. The husbandman, requiring a permanent shelter for the fruits of the earth which he had gathered in, erected the timber hut, which has been, with great appearance of probability, said to constitute the type of Grecian architecture. What was the earliest form in which the architecture of great cities was developed must be, to a great extent, matter of conjecture. That the most ancient ruins which exist at the present day are of the monolithic type-dwellings and temples hewn out of the solid rock, and monuments cut from a single mass of stone, such as the deserted habitations of Petra and the colossal remains found in Aboo Simbel-must be attributed to the indestructibility of that species of architecture. Yet the Pyramids of Egypt, and numerous ruins still found on the plains of Asia, indicate that brick was likewise a building material of great antiquity. The structure of the pre-historic cities of Europe, although not strictly monolithic, approximates closely to that style of architecture, being composed of masses of stone of such dimensions as to have been styled by the ancients Cyclopean. These were fitted together in their original unhewn condition, in most cases not even lying in courses, but having the interstices filled in with smaller stones. Such were the walls of Mycenæ, mentioned by Homer as renowned for magnificence,* and of Tiryns, still more ancient, of which Strabo tells us, "Prætus appears to have used Tiryns as a harbor, and to have had it walled by the Cyclops, who were seven in number and called Gastrocheirs (belly-handed), maintaining themselves by their art."* Of the latter city the foundations of the Acropolis are still to be traced, while of the Acropolis of Mycenae the Gate of the Lions mentioned by Pausanias still remains. The walls of Mycenae are from twenty-one to twenty-five feet in thickness, while the lintel of the gate is a single stone fifteen feet long and over four feet thick. Still huger are the lintels of a building among these same ruins, by some supposed to be the tomb of Agamemnon, which is composed of two solid blocks of stone, each twenty-seven feet in length and over seventeen wide.† A connecting link between pre-historic and historic times is found in the ancient cities of Egypt. We know that some of these cities were coeval with the days of Homer-notably Thebes, whose immense wealth is mentioned in the Odyssey, and instanced in the splendor of the gifts presented by its sovereigns to Menelaus and Helen. "In her soft hands the beauteous Phylo brought A silver canister, divinely wrought. To Sparta's queen of old the radiant vase For Polybus, her lord, whose sovereign sway Of the architecture of ancient Egypt the sole traces that remain are the temples and the tombs, unless we include the vast subterranean habitations which have induced many to infer that the Egyptians originally dwelt in excavations hollowed * Τερυνθὶ ὅρμητηρίω χρησασθαί δοκει Προίτος και τειχέσαι δία κυκλώπων ουσ ἑπτα μεν εἶναι, καλεισθαι δε Γαότεροχειρες, τρεφομενους εκ της τεχνήσ. + Gwilt, p. 13. † Φυλω δαργυρεον ταλαρον φερε τον οἱ έδωκεν * the out from the rock. So numerous and vast are, however, remains of these temples, that from them we can, in imagination, almost reconstruct the ancient cities; their principal streets lined with temples of immense extent, and constructed in a style imposing but monotonous; their porches of pyra-. midal shape often adorned with colossal figures cut from the solid rock; their square-built houses with terraced roofs and columns fashioned on the pattern of the lotos; and, extending beyond the walls, the pyramids which are supposed to be the final resting places of their sovereigns. In their mode of construction these temples show a great advance over the rude masonry of the walls of Mycenae and Tiryns. The stones of which they are erected evidence in their quarrying and working no inconsiderable degree of skill in the people by whom they were raised. Yet the preference for the monolithic style is everywhere perceptible. The colossal figures which adorned the entrance to the temple, the obelisks which stood in the doorways, even the columns which decorated the interior, were in most instances carved from the rock itself.† Yet, however imposing in their dimensions, the grandeur of these edifices had little to do with proportion or æsthetic beauty. As in their human figures the limbs were dwarfed by the immense head and body, so in their structures many of the columns, however massive, seemed crushed by the superincumbent entablature. Still, with all their defects, in an æsthetic point of view, the temples of ancient Egypt must have produced an effect imposing. beyond any more modern structure. The open court (Spoμoo), with its double avenue of sphinxes; the colossal vestibule (pozvλator); the gateway flanked by pyramidal towers; the vast quadrangle encompassed with lofty columns decorated with hieroglyphics and crowned with capitals designed from the lotos, the palmleaf, or perhaps the bell-shaped vase which forms the germ of the Corinthian capital; the walls, decorated in bas-relief, or emblazoned with designs in the most brilliant colors, may have well filled even the cultivated Greek traveller with astonishment and admiration. The analogies which exist between the architecture of ancient Egypt and the pre-historic cities of Central America— cities so ancient that forests grow on their ruins, and erected by nations whose existence had passed away before European foot trod American shores-will be found on investigation to be much more superficial than is generally supposed, and to indicate little more than the similarity of ideas which would naturally suggest themselves to all early workers in stone. The temples, it is true, are quadrangular, which appears to have been the primitive plan in all nations who were accustomed to construct their buildings of stone, and is a plan which convenience and utility would naturally suggest. The altars and many, in fact most, of the idols are monolithicwhich in itself only indicates the primitive character of the architecture-and are covered with what travellers, for want of a better term, have styled hieroglyphics, but which are, in reality, little more than sculptured representations of objects animate and inanimate (not unfrequently portions of the human body), and evidently carved on the stone surface for purposes of ornament, and not having any connection with writing, or probably much emblematic significance.* It is true that many of the structures in Central America are, like those of Egypt, pyramidal; but this is a mere peculiarity of external shape, which would naturally suggest itself to the primitive builder as the most effectual mode of securing solidity and permanency in the edifice. The structures in Central America are, moreover, rather truncated cones than pyramids-their bases are generally round-their summits terraces of raised platforms— their material solid earth walled with stone. The object of these American cones is, moreover, entirely different from that of the Egyptian pyramids. In almost every instance they * This will be evident on inspecting Catherwood's Pictures of the Sculptured Idols in Stephens' Central America, vol. i., pp. 138–159. |