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admitted. Some have been desirous of claiming it as an English invention. Against this the

examples, of great excellence, several in France, some in Germany, one in Portugal, have been. alledged. Thus far however I think is indisputable, that it is so far peculiarly English, as England is the only country throughout which it has been the reigning style, for centuries, from farthest south to farthest north, and from farthest east to farthest west. Beyond England, northward, it gained vogue in the south of Scotland, westward in the east of Ireland, southward in the north of France. I know not by whom the fine cathedrals of Amiens and Orleans, and that half finished at Auxerre, or the elegant church of saint Owen at Rouen, were built. The cathedral of Rheims, more celebrated than all, I never saw, nor can venture, from any representation that has fallen in my way, to speak of it critically. The architect of the magnificent church of the convent of Batalha in Portugal is said to have been of the sister British realm, now united, Ireland. Eastward of France the magnificent unfinished cathedral of Cologn is the only building I recollect to have seen, that has any clear title to association in the same class of style. At Naples, an inferior building of the kind, but completely bearing the character, has been the work of the Norman conquerors of that country. Whether anything of it

remains from them in Sicily, I never heard. England certainly has been the focus of that architecture. In England we trace the earliest display of its excellence at Salisbury: only in England its vigor following for centuries, and extending over the whole country; York north, and Winchester south, Ely east, and Wells west, may suffice for mention in England only is known anything like that last display of its excellence, not less extraordinary than the first, in King's college chapel at Cambridge: in England only the complete progress remains evident, from its earliest excellence to its senile luxury and approaching dotage, seen especially in Henry the seventh's chapel at Westminster; and in England only the full exhibition of its metempsychosis, in the transition to the restored Roman architecture, through the crude, half-formed style of Elizabeth and the first James's reigns.

LETTER XX.

Revival of Roman Architecture.—Introduction of revived Roman Architecture into England by Inigo Jones.

ROME and Florence possessed no valuable style of architecture, when in the fifteenth century, literature and science, rising there with extraordinary vigor, from the graves in which they had lain for ages, were quickly attended by all the arts. Then, as the ancient statues, eagerly sought under the soil, so the ruins of ancient buildings, yet standing on it, or only half buried, became objects of just admiration; and the obscure precepts of the great Roman teacher of architecture, Vitruvius, saved among the wreck of ancient letters, were diligently studied. So Bramante, and Michael. Angelo, and Palladio, and many others, formed their taste. The foundations of that prodigious building, saint Peter's church at Rome, were laid, and Roman architecture revived rapidly, in great splendor.

At this time the example of Rome, highly respected throughout Europe, was, for the church, decisive. But the schism which quickly arose, adding vigor to literature in some branches, operated, in those countries which revolted against the corruptions of the Roman supremacy, as a check upon the fine arts, and especially architecture.

The improvements of Italy had begun soon to make their way into England. Some silver plate of so early a date as Henry the seventh's reign, shows the taste which the Italians distinguish by the title of cinquecento. But as, in this world, great benefits rarely come unattended with some evil, and equally great evils not without some compensating good, so, at the reformation, intercourse with Rome becoming a political crime, that advantageous migration of improved arts from Italy was suddenly checked; and, with a short interval only and turbulent, during Mary's reign, the interdiction continued near a century.

Meanwhile, however, the religious and political enmities did not operate to the total prevention of communication on arts and sciences. In Edward the sixth's reign the Roman orders of architecture were revived in London, in the magnificent residence built by the protector Somerset in the Strand. But unhappily the style of his building altogether was too defective to have or to deserve public favor. A manner of applying the coluinns of the Roman architecture advantageously, in private mansions, had not then been imagined, even in Italy. A style therefore, recommended by the genius of Holbein, a very imperfect improvement of the common Gothic of the continent, was no unsuccessful competitor with Somerset's imperfect Roman, for succession to the Planta

genet style; which the inlightened minds of the times saw, with all its merits for church-building, little accommodated to the general objects of civil and domestic architecture. The result, amid the prejudice against everything Roman, and in the failure of an architect of observation and talent to command the public taste in a good course, was a style of building most barbarous, during the two long reigns of Elizabeth and James the first; while more very large private mansions were built, than in any equal period of our history. Of public edifices, in that style, the schools at Oxford are an eminent, and fortunately, of any considerable magnitude, I believe, a singular example.

Meanwhile saint Peter's at Rome, though a model too vast for general purposes, yet, with all its imperfections of general design, after several alterations of the original plan, in the course of more than a century while it was building, exhibited altogether a most valuable school for the taste of Europe, then emerging from, not absolute barbarism, yet a semibarbarism. But Palladio seems to have been the first who, with talent, had opportunity, to show, in any considerable extent, how the admirable style of the ruined buildings of old Rome might be most advantageously applied to modern civil and domestic purposes.

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