in all parts of Europe, rejected, as if by common consent, the Greek and Roman manner, chose to set up pillars instead of columns, and to render even these pillars more like the Doric, the heaviest of the three Grecian orders, than any other. They saw in the friezes of regular structures, figures of eagles and griffins; the eagle they neglected, and they copied the griffin for no other apparent reason than because it was a monster not existing in nature; in the bas-relief they found geniuses, trophies, and flowers, none of which they thought proper to imitate; but they hewed out owls, and frogs, and monkeys, and, in a thousand other instances, shewed a perversion of taste and judgment, which would have been altogether incredible, if the monuments of it were not still extant among us. Of these the old English Gothic are certainly the chief, both for their antiquity and their grandeur; but before there was any structure erected in the Gothic style, many execrable things, called buildings, were produced upon the degrading principles of Grecian architecture, and the time from the extinction, or ra-` ther perversion, of ancient taste, may be divided into three periods; from the 4th century to the 9th, from the 9th to the end of the 15th, and from that time to the present.

Though the Christians were at first so scattered and oppressed by persecution, that they had no better places of worship than the caves, which they formed or made in the sides of rocks, or below the surface of the ground, yet they had public places of worship before the 4th century. Some ecclesiastical authors have asserted, that the Christians had spacious churches richly adorned before the time of Constantine the Great: for they say, that the first object of his care, after the defeat of Maxentius, was the reparation of the temples of the true God; but to give these authors all their weight, their testimony can only refer to the churches of the east: those in the Lesser Asia, in Syria, and the Lower Egypt; those of the west, and even of Rome, are entirely out of the question; for though it be true, that from the time of Trajan to that of Constantine, the emperors resided as much in Asia as in Europe, yet it is equally true, that Christianity was much more repressed and restrained in Europe than in Asia. During the reign of Dioclesian, and some other emperors, who distinguished themselves by their moderation, the Christians ventured to quit their vaults and catacombs, and erected some buildings, which were set apart for the public worship of God; but as they were in perpetual fear of persecution, even when they did not suffer it, so long as the emperors con

tinued idolaters, they did not dare to give their churches an air of grandeur, lest the jealousy of the infidels should raise a new storm against them. It seems therefore probable, that the spacious and rich churches mentioned by Eusebius and Nicephorus, were only spacious and rich in comparison of the caverns and dens, in which the Christians assembled in times of actual persecution; of these there are not now the least remains, but perhaps it is easy to form a just idea of them, by considering what the churches were, which were erected when Christianity was first the established religion, when its patrons were the lords of the world, and its professors might safely hold the power of idolaters in defiance. Of these there are several now extant; some that were built in the reign of Constantine, and others from the time of his children and successors till the total ruin of the empire.

We must therefore date our inquiry into the form of the architecture and decorations of the churches of the west from the reign of Constantine. This prince, after his conversion, did not content himself with repairing the churches which had been built already, but he signalized his zeal by many monuments of the triumph of that religion which he had adopted. He might indeed have devoted to the service of Christianity some of the finest temples of Pagan superstition, and posterity would then not only have commended his piety, but admired his taste. He thought, perhaps, that the Pagan temples had been too much profaned by idolatry to receive the pure worshippers of Christ; he might think them too small, or he might not choose to give his heathen subjects offence; however, for these, or some other reasons, he chose rather to build new structures than change the use of the old; and, therefore, he gave his own palace of Latran, at Mount Cælius, to supply materials for building a Christian church. Soon after which he built that of St. Peter, at Mount Vatican, and another in the Ostian Way, dedicated to St. Paul. All these were built upon the same plan, and that of St. Paul still preserves its original form, called the Basilick, because it was the same with that of certain large buildings adjacent to royal palaces, where sovereign princes administered justice to their people, Some other buildings, called also from their figure Basilicks, were used as a kind of exchange for merchants to negociate their business in the time of this emperor. A Basilick was a pile of building twice as long as it was wide, and terminated at one of its extremities by a hemicycle; two orders of columns placed one upon another reached the whole length

of the building within, and formed one grand walk in the middle, between one row of columns and the other, and two narrower walks, one between each row of columns and the wall. To the extremity terminated by the hemicycle, there was sometimes added a branch, or arm, reaching from one side to the other, and giving the whole building the form of a T. This form of building was preferred by Constantine, probably because it was roomy, solemn, majestic, and expressed the figure of the cross. St. Paul's, how+ ever, though in its original state, does by no means give us a just idea of the Basilicks of antiquity from which it was copied for its want of proportion, and the bad taste of its ornaments, sufficiently shew that architecture was greatly degenerated, even in the time of Constantine. The nave is adorned with four rows of columns, twenty in each row, which divide it into five walks, each column being one block of marble, except a very few; of the forty that form the middle walk, twenty-four are said to have been brought from the tomb of Hadrian; they are about three feet in diameter, of the Corinthian order, fluted; the marble is veined with blue, and there is nothing of the kind among all the remains of antiquity that exceeds them, either in workmanship or materials; the other sixteen are of a greyish white, and are the most clumsy and heavy imagin able; scarcely any two of them are the same in all their pro portions, and there is not one in which the lines of the Auting are straight, or the hollow cleanly cut out, and of an equal depth. It appears, at the first glance, that the carver worked merely by his eye, without any principle to direct him, and at every stroke of his chisel looked with a scrupulous perplexity at his model, supposing that he had not imitated it, when he had chipped the shaft into grooves from the capital to the base. The other forty columns are of granite, and are much less; the surface may be said to be smooth, as a distinction from being fluted, but, in every other sense, it is rough and irregular. In the two branches of the transverse part of the building, at the end which forms the top of the T, there are many columns of different kinds of marble, some red, some grey, and some of a dirty white, not answering to each other in any kind of symmetry.

The good Greek and Roman architects always gave their columns an entablature: but the architects of Constantine not thinking that necessary, the columns of St. Paul's nave are without it, Over the columns there is a wall carried up more than thirty feet, which supplies the place of the

second order of columns used in 'the Basilicks of the Romans; the two branches of the cross only have a ceiling; the nave is only covered with a sloping roof, of which the naked timbers are seen from below. Upon this occasion, it may be remarked, that none of the first Roman churches were vaulted, for among all that remain there is not one with such a roof to be found, and in those which have ceilings, the ceiling appears manifestly to have been added in later times; for it was not common, even in the 16th century, for any part of the church to be ceiled but the chancel. This defect might have been imputed to the timid ignorance of the builders, if it was not certain that those who vaulted the baths of Constantine, might, if they had thought fit, have vaulted a church; and it might have been imputed to a servile imitation of the Pagan Basilicks, if we had not been told by Vitruvius, that some of them were covered with vaulted roofs. As to the front of the Basilick of St. Paul, there is a modern portico about 20 feet high, and the rest is a brick wall, having on the point at top a Greek cross, decorated with some rude Mosaic. To this general description many particulars may be added, which will shew in a still stronger light the stupidity and ill taste of the time; some of the columns have no base at all; others are all base, being one great square block; in one place a column of the Corinthian order is placed opposite to one of the Composite; in another the Tuscan is contrasted with the Ionic, yet the whole appears to have been the painful effort of long labour, and unremitted diligence; nor must it be forgotten that the 24 columns, which were already exquisitely finished, are, by an ingenious contrivance, made to share in the general impropriety, for, instead of being equally divided in opposite rows, thirteen of them are placed on one side, and eleven on the other.

Thus it appears, that all which the magnificence of Constantine, who erected the edifice, and of Theodosius, who added some ornaments, could effect, was to raise a vast structure, and to decorate it with the spoils of those buildings that had been erected when the arts were in their perfection. After the persecutions against Christianity had entirely ceased, more churches abounded at Rome than at any other place; they were erected over the tombs of martyrs, and even formed out of the houses which they had inhabited; little obscure oratories were enlarged into public temples, and the edicts that were published from the time of Constantine to that of Theodosius, for the destruction of Pagan temples, furnished the pious founders

with spoils of inestimable value, of which, however, they made a very bad use; for the plan of Constantine's Basilicks was universally followed, whether the church to be built was little or great, except that sometimes the building at the end, which gave the whole the figure of the cross, was omitted: they are all filled with columns, taken from adjacent buildings, and set up without the least regard to their height or their diameter, to the kind of marble, the order, or the decorations by which they are distinguished; from those which were too long the base is taken away, and to those that were too short a supplemental base was added, so that some coJumns in the same row have two bases, and some have none. Entablatures were quite out of fashion, and neither frieze nor moulding of the cornice was to be attempted: such are all the churches that are at this time to be found in Rome, except two or three rotundos, and those which have been erected or modernised since the revival of the arts. Such are the principal productions of twelve successive ages, and when they are beheld and considered, it is easy to make a just estimation of the magnificence which has been attributed to them by the authors of the lives of the popes, such as Anastasius, the library keeper; Platina, and some others. There are, however, seven or eight ancient buildings that have been converted into Christian churches, but they are neither great nor beautiful, the Pantheon excepted; and so diligent were the saints, in the first ardour of their zeal, to fulfil the edicts of the emperor, for the abolition of Pagan ingenuity, that of 2000 temples, which were standing within the walls of Rome, in the meridian of her glory, these are all that remain. The temple of Faustina serves at this hour for a chapel to a religious house, and the temple of Remus is become a kind of vestibule to a conventual church.

1759, July and Aug.

XLV. Description of the first Theatre at Athens.

ANCIENT authors have treated of the construction of thea tres but obscurely and imperfectly. Vitruvius has given us no account either of their dimensions, or of the number of their principal and constituting parts; presuming, I suppose, that they had been well enough known, or could never have