by the Greeks, shelter was highly desirable against the scorching heat of the sun, and against heavy rains, but not equally against cold, unless for a small portion of the year. With such shelter the peristyle around the cell, the roof being added, would accommodate numbers; and thus the ordinary form of the Grecian temple was completed.

LETTER V.

Character of Design in Egyptian Architecture.-Stone and Brick, Egyptian Materials.—Timber a principal Material of the early Grecian Architecture.

No considerable monuments, of early antiquity, as far as I recollect from my reading of travels, are known to remain in Palestine or Phenicia. Any certain knowledge of what was there, before Alexander's conquest gave prevalence to the Grecian taste, we gather almost only from the very interesting descriptions of Solomon's temple and palace, in the book of Kings, and from the account of the restored temple of Jerusalem, extant in the history of Josephus; both, though highly curious and valuable, yet very scanty for the architect's purpose.

But, in Egypt, the existing buildings, of antiquity beyond chronological research, are of a

magnificence to excite the admiration of every traveller, and of all others, whom the descriptions, faithful evidently from the concurrence of travellers of different ages and different nations, have reached. Of these buildings, I think we have agreed, in looking together over the published representations of them, that they exhibit much of the principles, but nothing of the perfection, of fine taste. Often we see in them an imposing grandeur, but depraved by the interference of something incongruous; often very elegant simplicity, but injured by the intrusion of something incoherently complex; often good proportion of principal parts, with effect deranged by mismanagement of divisions and subordinate forms; often eager purpose of ornament and decoration, never happily pursued. An able criticism on Egyptian architecture, pointing out, in the various buildings, the good principles, which the Greeks, with the penetration to discover had the judgement to adopt, and the mismanagement of that detail, which the Greeks, also adopting in part, had the happy good taste to improve and perfect, might be highly advantageous for students.

I venture here, you see, to suppose Grecian architecture derived from Egypt. The learned and ingenious architect Wilkins, in his late publication of the Antiquities of Sicily and the south of Italy, has ventured an opinion that the Gre

cian Doric column, not of Grecian invention, was precisely the column of Solomon's temple at Jerusalem. But, to establish this, it was necessary to controvert our translation of the Bible; which renders by the word chapiter, (a word obviously enough of the same import as capital) what he reckons could not, in the original, nean the capital; for, we should offend,' he says, against every just idea of proportion, were we to imagine that the capitals of the columns were little less than one-third of the height of the shaft.' It cannot, I think indeed be disputed, at least I would not dispute, that a column so proportioned would be ill proportioned; and yet I believe the true meaning of the passage to be given in our translation of the Bible. Not only it is the most obvious interpretation, but it is very remarkably confirmed by remaining examples of Egyptian architecture; and that Solomon got his style, at least in part, from Egypt, will I think generally be reckoned more probable than that Greece gained hers intire from Jerusalem. For these matters, however, we can only amuse ourselves with conjecture. What we are assured of is, that Design in Architecture, whether indigenous or adventitious, was perfected in Greece, at an age when elsewhere, except as the account of Solomon's buildings in the book of Kings may

inform us, it is known only through the existing relics of buildings in Egypt.

Stone and brick, we have observed, were the materials of Egyptian building; the former mostly of an unfavorable kind, the latter essentially inferior. In Greece, though most of its forests have now been many centuries prostrate, yet, to the time of its earliest extant historians, timber abounded. The example then of Phenicia, the mistress of Greece in the arts generally, could hardly fail to lead to an extensive use of timber in building. Solomon's columns, described as having chapiters, were of brass; but columns or pillars of wood, we find, were in greater number, about his buildings. The silverfir abounded both in the forests of Phenicia, and in the forests of Greece; and the trunk of that tree, reduced only to a competent length, would be at once, almost without farther workmanship, the shaft of a Grecian column. The names of many of the members of Grecian architecture, assist other indications, showing wood to have been largely used in the early Grecian temples; and that remarkable circumstance in the Greek language, the use of the word wood to signify matter in general, so that the matter of a discourse was called the wood of a discourse, is a powerful additional testimony that wood was the

principal material of the artists of the early ages of Greece. To the time of Xenophon, the time of the greatest perfection of Grecian art, wood was a material not thought unfit even for statues of the deities, in those smaller temples, where neither a great revenue appropriated to religious purposes, nor extensive public favor, afforded means for large expence.

The columns which the Egyptians, whether inventing, or wheresoever borrowing, used, gave richness, and variety, and even grandeur to their buildings. But grace was deficient; the grace of form, the grace of ornament, and even the grace of proportion. Their proportions were those attributed, in the book of Kings, to the brazen pillars of Solomon's temple, which Wilkins has justly reprobated. Egypt bore no tree to suggest the idea of that elegant form, simple in its variety, which the woods of Greece furnished, nearly complete, in their natural growth. A palm-tree indeed might suggest an elegant form, what is called a term; but much refinement, under direction of a chaste fancy, would be wanted to carry so far the improvement of art, for her purposes, on ideas suggested by nature, in forms, for her very different purposes, already perfect. The palm-tree may also have assisted toward the invention of the Egyptian column. But the Phenicians had all the advantage of Greece in fir-forests at hand.