A mistaken plainness has usurped the place of true simplicity, which is the same mistake as an affected plainness in manners or appearance, lest one should be suspected of foppery. All houses, all churches are finished within side. by the plane (or mould-plane) and plaster-smoother. Has a man made a fortune, he moves from his plain house which cost ten thousand, to one which cost an hundred thousand. Now perhaps his poor friend shall see something beautiful. Alas, it is but the old house three times as large, the walls and the woodwork three times as smooth; a little warmer house in winter, than the old one, a little airier in summer. Verily, friend, thou hast done little with thy hundred thousand, beyond enriching thy carpenter.

To see materials used skilfully and in accordance with their peculiar qualities is a great source of beauty in architecture. The vice of many of our would-be pretty buildings is that the material is entirely disguised, so that for aught we know they may be marble, or wood, or pasteboard; all we see is a plain white surface. Have done with this paltry concealment; let us see how the thing is built. A Swiss cottage is beautiful, because it is wooden par excellence; every joint and timber is seen, nay the wood is not even painted but varnished. So of the old heavy-timbered picturesque houses of England.

Hope says; "Je n'ai pas besoin d'appuyer ici sur la perfection que les Grecs ont donnée à toutes les parties, essentielles ou accessoires de leurs edifices; elle alla si loin que, dans certains temples ils paraissent avoir été animés d'un sentiment purement religieux, penetrés de l'idee que la divinité voyait ce qui échappait à l'œil de l'homme, et qu'il fallait rendre toutes les parties egalement dignes de l'être immortel auquel l'édifice était consacré.

"L'addresse en mécanique est une faculté tout-à-fait distinct du gout dans les beaux arts.

"En Grèce, la colonne était un élément de construction plus characteristique et plus essentiel que la muraille."

Among the Romans, on the contrary, the wall was the integral part of the building, of which the columns served only to adorn the nakedness. Among ourselves, although the pillars we so frequently see have the real purpose of sustaining a projection, to protect from the rays of the sun; yet there is no reason that we should adopt for this

purpose a model of proportions that were meant to support the immense weight of the whole structure in Greece. How much more elegant would our verandahs be, were the wooden columns just so large as is needful for the purpose for which they were erected.

"Ainsi, les premières basiliques chrétiennes n'offraient, dans toute leur entendue, si l'on excepte leurs colonnes antiques, aucune moulure, aucune partie qui ressortit et se detachât de leur surface plane et perpendiculaire; elles ne présentaient, au-dessus de leurs murailles nues que la charpente transversale de leur plafond, et de leur toit; elles ressemblaient en un mot à de vastes granges, que l'on aurait bati de somptueux materiaux, mais la simplicité, la pureté, la magnificence, l'harmonie de toutes leurs parties constitutives, donnaient a ces granges un air de grandeur que nous cherchons en vain dans l'architecture plus compliquée des églises modernes."

In the eye of every New Englander, the essential parts of a church are a spire or tower, half-disengaged from the building and formerly a porch, and a simple oblong building like a barn, forming the main body of the edifice; within, the pulpit at the end opposite the tower, a gallery running round the other three sides, supported by columns which in some cases also shoot upward to aid in supporting the roof. In spite of the almost total absence of beautiful specimens, it is in vain to say that this form is not as well adapted to beauty as the basilica or any other. If the builder would content himself with putting together these essential parts with the utmost simplicity, without any excrescences or breaking up, striving only to balance the members against each other, so that each should have its proper proportion, he would produce a specimen of national church architecture. The spire would seem to be in better taste than the square tower, partly because of the associations, but also because its form is agreeable to a construction in wood, which we shall long see in this country. The artist may employ all his taste and imagination in decorations, (always entirely subordinate,) of these main parts, taking care that his decorations are in keeping with the uses of the building. How unmeaning beside the unpretending simplicity of such a building, is the pretence of a Grecian front, not that the native product shows so

much genius in the invention, but that it has a sacred association in our eyes, which the other has not.

In the same way that the literature of the ancient world, for so long a time dwarfed the authors of a modern date, does the ancient architecture, Gothic and Grecian, dwarf our builders. They dare not invent for themselves, for their inventions would seem so puerile beside the great works to which the world would compare them. It is cheaper for them and more satisfactory to their customers, to borrow a form that all the world has admitted to be beautiful, and almost inevitably degrade it by putting it to a wrong use. In poesy no one longer doubts that the nature around us is the nature from which Homer and Phidias drew inspiration, and it is the spirit and not the forms of ancient art that make its productions almost divine. Scarcely in architecture do we see the first faint light of such a dawn, yet it depends upon ourselves, that ours shall be that glory. An intense thirst for the beautiful exists among us, it only requires a direction. It is idle for us to complain of the want of models, the want of instruction. England has wealth of these beyond count, yet builds nowadays no more tastefully than we; it must come from ourselves, from reflection, from the study of nature.

Materials rightly employed grow more beautiful with age. In pure architecture, everything is to be rejected, that will grow less beautiful with age. For this end, it is sufficient that every material should be employed with an eye to its peculiar properties. This rule, if strictly followed, would indeed do away with several materials, the cheapness of which has rendered their use almost universal, but which deserve no place in the severe and simple architecture which should distinguish our churches. Let it not be our reproach that we are a nation of lath and plaster and temporary shifts; let our joints and beams be made beautiful, not hidden, let our wood work show the grain of the wood for ornament, not hide it under paint.

Suppose one of our churches were to be left alone for fifty years, when we enter how unlovely would it be, the plaster dropping away, showing the laths like ribs beneath, the paint dingy and mouldy, reminding us of nothing but the tomb; but the interior of the unpainted, unplastered,

gothic church would still be beautiful in age, and fragments of carved oak be treasured at its weight in silver.

Architecture is a tendency to organization. Nature organizes matter, and endows it with individual life. Man organizes it for his own ends, but it has no life but so far as he has been able to endow it with his own. Now in natural organizations as the tree or animal, we see no part that has not a meaning and use, and each part of that material which answers to its end. This also is a fundamental law of architecture.

The ancient architecture is entitled to that great praise of producing on the mind an effect of unity. It has been too often the bane of modern architecture, that what one man designed, his successor changed, so that to the most unpractised eye, the grossest inconsistencies are constantly apparent; till we are almost ready to say in despair, there is no good architecture but in the mind of the artist. It cannot be doubted that either Bramante, Sangallo, or M. Angelo, alone, would have made a far finer building than the actual St. Peters.

The modern architects certainly attempted more difficult things than the ancient. The Greek had not to invent the form of his edifice. Nature and immemorial custom had done that for him. He was only to see that all his details were in due proportion. There was not so much room for bad taste. But the church architect of the renaissance had the whole dome of the heavens to exhibit his antics in.

MONUMENTS.

In regard to monuments it may be laid down as a rule that all sentimental monuments are bad, and all conceits of every sort; as, a broken column, a mother weeping over her child, a watchful dog, &c. They strike at first, but the mind wearies to death of them the moment they are repeated. To my mind, a monument should be an architectural structure (including any admitted form of obelisk, pyramid, or of any style of architecture), which should be only striking by the simplicity and purity of its form. adornments may be infinitely rich, but always entirely sub

Its

ordinate; so that at a distance the effect shall always be of simplicity and repose. A simple headstone might be wrought by a Phidias, might contain the most exquisite sculptures, and still never lose its character of a simple headstone. Our monuments are all in the open air; consequently those Gothic tombs that with all their splendor have so severely religious an air, are denied us. I prefer upon a tomb figures of a vague character, what are called academic figures. These, when noble in their form and expression, produce an effect analogous to architecture, suggestive, whereas all figures of a fixed character, Charities, Hopes, Griefs, &c., irresistibly put their own character forward, and give the intellect an occupation where we should awaken only feelings. It is as if we should introduce descriptive music into a requiem. A monument should never tell you what to think or feel, but only suggest feeling.

The renowned monument of Lorenzo di Medici by Michel Angelo is an illustration. The feeling of repose, not of forgetfulness, but of deepest thought, which it impresses, is so complete, that the gazer almost forgets himself to stone, and it seems like an intrusion to ask what the figures mean. We feel that they mean all things.

The style and spirit of the Grecian Architecture is so pure that when an architect adopts it, he must carry it out. As far as the details are concerned, nothing can with propriety be added to or taken from them. They are things fixed. If a man uses the Ionic, we demand a pure Greek Ionic, and everybody knows what it ought to be. To adapt these details in Greek spirit to modern needs, this is what classic architecture has in modern times to do. The architects who have accomplished this feat in a satisfactory manner, in modern times, are so few, that one may number them on his fingers and scarce need his left hand. To do this a man must be a Greek, and more than a Greek. He has to live in the past and present at the same time. He must be independent of his time, and yet able to enter fully into it.

The Gothic and the Lombard architecture, on the other hand, make no such all but impossible demands,—or at least did not, at the time in which they flourished, though it is no less hard for us to enter into their spirit than into