purposes, the fir, and the cedar. Domestic convenience, for which readiness of construction is often important, and public convenience, which requires accommodation for assembled multitudes, would urge to the use of these, and promote the cultivation of the joiner s art.

Solomon appears to have proposed to raise the most magnificent temple, and the most splendid palace, that had yet been seen; unless greater power and wealth may have produced in Egypt, or in Babylonia, and possibly in regions eastward of Babylonia, magnificence which he could not rival. But Solomon had married the king of Egypt's daughter. The art, the science, and the taste of that country therefore would be open to him.

The circumstances of Egypt, natural and political, were peculiar; and the peculiarities of both could not fail to affect the Architecture. The whole country being united under one government, and singularly protected by nature against the approach of hostile neighbours, military architecture would not be cultivated there as in Syria. Being nearly destitute of wood, the various stones, with which it abounded, would be the materials for its edifices, where any splendor was desired; and the institutions and the superstition of the Egyptians led them to desire magnificence in Civil, but more especially in Sacred Architecture. Accordingly the art of working stone was carried to great

perfection among them; at how early a period we know not, but certainly very early and through the lasting quality of their stones, and the freedom of their climate from the destructive effects of frost, large relics of their buildings, to this day, show their style and manner, of an antiquity not to be exactly fixed, but certainly beyond what can be ascertained of any other country.

Thus, in Solomon's age, Egypt had the ablest stoneworkers probably then in the world. But the historian specially assures us that Phenicia had the most skilful Hewers of Wood, as our translation renders it; for which, as the narrative seems enough to show, might not improperly be put, carpenters and joiners and carvers. A supply of these was obtained from the friendship of the king of Tyre, who was in alliance with the king of Judæa. Whether then merely for speed and cheapness, or whether for the superiority in taste and execution of the Phenician designers and workmen, not only much of the solid, but all the ornamental parts, of both the temple and the palace, which were not of metal, appear to have been of wood: not only floors and roofs were of timber, but walls were wainscoted, even columns were wooden, and among much interior decoration, in carving of the same material, there was what it should seem may not improperly be called statuary of wood. If the account at large, in the book of

phyry, granite, and basalt, abounded, yet any so yielding to the tool as to be commodious for or dinary building, was rare. Necessity thus urged to the invention and use of bricks; which we are assured were largely used in Egypt. The common employment of this material' would hardly fail to lead to the rectangular form in building. The brick itself would far more readily be made in a rectangular than any other regular form adapted to building. That form in the material would lead to an analogous form in the edifice to be raised with it, to which other circumstances would also persuade. Where a roof was desired, it would be found most easily managed for strait walls: when a building was to be divided into several apartments, the advantage of the rectangular form would be as obvious as the inconvenience of every other; for domestic architecture, aptitude for division is an important quality. Experience then of the superior convenience of that form for the domestic would recommend it for other buildings; and, if the Grecian temple rose on the ruin of the king's palace, its form would be likely to be at once rectangular. I do not remember that any trace of a circular temple has been found in Greece.

In the times of which Homer's poems treat, kings, we find, were universally pontiffs; their private estates principally furnished the victims in

the sacrificial feast, and the common place for the ceremony was in front of their palace gate. When the governments of all the little states of Greece where changed to republics, some new provision was wanted for the maintenance of the prevailing religion. Whether then spreading from Eleusis, or in whatever other manner arising, not long after Homer, priesthoods were instituted, and temples built in every part of Greece; and what the king's income formerly did, a revenue pro vided by the community was appointed to supply. The establishment seems to have been generally large and expensive; numerous inferior ministers, herdmen, butchers, and cooks, forming an important part of it.

The rite of sacrifice was an institution peculiarly adapted to the early ages of the world: connecting religion with the daily meal, it was fraught with benefit to depraved and wandering man. That general sense of religion, and of dependence on the deity, which, among the grossest corruptions of belief and practice, it powerfully assisted to maintain, was of inestimable use, if only through the respect which it inspired for the sanctity of oaths. But the offering on the altar moreover brought the society together, and often it was the only resource of the indigent against starving: the institution operated as a poor-law for the early ages. Reverence for the altar therefore was inculcated in

carly infancy; to hold as a brotherhood all who communicated in the ceremony, and shared in the charitable meal there, became respected as the law equally of God and man: to profane the altar, to offer violence to any at the altar, to break an oath sworn at the altar, were esteemed crimes involving the guilty in enmity, at the same time, with the deity and with all mankind. How far the refinement, or the idleness, of our days, abolishing, by neglect, that small and easy portion of the ceremony, recommended by the example of the divine author of the religion we profess, and habitually observed by our fathers, are, even in a worldly view, doing ill, may deserve consideration beyond any proper limits of our subject here.

Through what circumstances then the Temple grew and became, hardly less than the Altar, a necessary appendage of Grecian religion, we are equally uninformed as how the revolution happened, which abolished the civil, judicial, and military offices of kings, leaving the sacerdotal. But, though the king's palace seems to have had no part appropriated to religious ceremony, yet, being the depository of whatever furniture and utensils the rite of sacrifice required, a substitute would be wanted, when the palace was no more. To supply this want, the cell seems to have been added to the Grecian temple. In the climate then of most of the countries occupied