Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/93

Rh and nothing can be added, and nothing can be taken away. It is complete in itself; and refuses the admission of all other ornament." Much discussion seems to have been wasted on the portico of St Martin's, some insisting that it is a mere model of the portico of the Pantheon, or some other production of classic art; others maintaining its equality in merit and design to the best specimens of Grecian architecture. A portico, to bear the name, must have basements, pillars, capitals, and an entablature, just as a house must have a roof and windows, and a bridge arches; so all that originality can possibly achieve in such a work, is the harmony of the proportions and ornaments with each other, and with the rest of the building ; it is in having made the proportions and ornaments different from those of the Pantheon, and adapted them to a totally different building, that Gibbs has been original, and it is on the pleasure which the whole combination affords to the eye, that his merit depends; a merit, however, which cannot come in competition with that of the inventor of the portico. The next church of the fifty, undertaken by Gibbs, was St Mary's in the Strand, a work on which, if we may judge from its appearance, he bestowed more labour with less effect. Instead of appearing like the effort of a single grand conception, forming a complete and harmonizing whole, it is like a number of efforts clustered together. Instead of being one design, the interstices in which are filled up by details, it is a number of details united together; in gazing on which, the mind, instead of absorbing the grandeur of the whole at one view, wanders from part to part, finding no common connexion by which the joint effect of all may be summoned before it at once.

Gibbs had just prepared the plans of the buildings we have described, and was in the high and palmy state of his fortunes, when his kind patron, having had his overtures to procure the allegiance of the Highland clans contumeliously rejected, and having been disgusted and thrown in fear by the impeachment of Oxford and Stafford, and the exile of Orinond and Bolingbroke, resolved to avenge his personal wrongs, by a recourse to the feudal fiction of the divine origin of hereditary right, to maintain the theoretic purity of which, a nation contented with its king was plunged in civil war, that the king they ought not to have been contented without, should be restored. Family ruin followed the rebellion of the earl; but the architect, fortified by the practice of a profession, the principles of which politics could not sway, arid possessing knowledge which, unlike the art of governing, could not be deprived of its efficacy by the influence of the party in power, remained unmolested on the step to which he had advanced, and looked forward to the prospect of other honours.

The most magnificent, though perhaps not the purest of Gibbs's works, is the Radcliffe Library at Oxford, on the completion of which, he received the degree of master of arts from that university. The Radcliffe Library is of a circular form, rising in the centre of an oblong square of 370 feet by 110, with a cupola 140 feet high and 100 feet in diameter. The lofty dome of this building raises itself in the centre of almost every prospect of Oxford, and gives a characteristic richness to the landscape. "The Radcliffe dome," says Allan Cunningham, "in fact conveys to every distant observer the idea of its being the air-hung crown of some gigantic cathedral or theatre. It is, perhaps, the graiidest feature in the grandest of all English architectural landscapes; it rises wide and vast amid a thousand other fine buildings, interrupts the horizontal line, and materially increases the picturesque effect of Oxford;" on a nearer and more critical view, however, the spectator is disappointed to find that a want of proportion betwixt the cupola and the rest of the building, slight, but still very perceptible, deadens the effect of the magnificent whole, a mistake on the part of the architect, which has frequently turned the whole mass of taste