Page:Architectural Review and American Builders' Journal, Volume 1, 1869.djvu/191

 1868.] Monthly Review. 163 through brackets or cantilevers. Al- though we have described a Grecian roof, modified by eave balustrades and facade statue pedestals, it allows either the Tuscan roof or the flat roof; yet all these are low, and restricted to nearly the same lines. It permits also circular heads to niches, doors, and windows ; and, by way of ornament to the latter, when they have lintels, it indulges quite considerably in the broken pediment, which — although we have nothing to remark against it as a mystic symbol amongst the Freemasons, or as an ap- propriate adjunct to any Masonic hall — architecturally and critically weighed, must be felt as a defect, however strenu- ously, from habit or from need of a broken line, architects may defend it ; for the angular lines of a true pediment represent two rafters well braced in the angles made by them with the horizontal line, and able to uphold both each other and the ridge-piece, which rests upon their apex ; whereas, if the pediment is broken, or, in other phrase, the upper and joining ends of these rafters are cut off, the place of the ridge-piece is vacated, the ridge-piece itself is unsupported, and the rafters, so far from being fit to sup- port any superincumbent weight — which they often do, without any ridge-piece — are unable to hold themselves up. It is in matters of this sort that the world misses the subtle adaptation, the inevit- able truth of the Greeks. Theoretically, anj r base of support is supposed to be strengthened commensurately with the pressure or weight to be upborne, and a moulding is a strengthening hem, bor- der, band, or bond. Practically, the designer of the broken pediment supplies the integrally connected strong angle he cut away by a detached urn, or some- thing of that description ; supports the urn upon the feeblest part of its remain- ing substance; and, after sawing across, or breaking, the rafters of its gable or gablet, expects them to upbear, either a part of the structure, or a detached weight. Tor any coherency of purpose, we might as well expect stability in a pyramid resting upon its apex, with its base in the air. This paradox in action is almost equal to the paradox in diction, wherewith the Egyptian priests amused themselves at the expense of Herodotus, the Father of History. They told him, that the pyra- mids were finished from the top down- wards, leaving him to infer, if he wore unsophisticated enough, that they were commenced in the air, and gradually worked downwards to a solid foundation upon the bed limestone. They were finished from the top, and could not be finished in any other manner. When Herodotus saw them, about B. C. 450, they were cased smoothly, from base to point, the point itself running out to a sharp angle. This — as Dr. Lepsius, the distinguished Egyptologist, has since proved — necessitated their being finished from the top to the bottom. The pyra- mids were built, although the Coptic hierarchs did not find it necessary to suggest as much to Herodotus — in great steps, so that when any one was finished as to its chief mass, the uppermost step would be approximately a cube in shape. A line drawn from any of the four up- per, outer angles of this cube to the centre of the outer base of the pyramid, upon that side, would just touch all the outer angles of all the great steps on that side, from the summit to the plain. For the purpose of weathering, though hardly needed in that climate, we may suppose the very peak-block of stone, to be itself a pyramid, of exactly the same slant of sides as the pyramid whereof it formed the crown, and that it projected a little way beyond the sides of the highest square. This cap-stone being placed, next below it would be fitted others, step by step, each range overlapped by the range above it, and the outer surface' of all the ranges kept upon exactly the same angle of finishing surface by the chisel of the stone-mason. The steps themselves would furnish the scaffolding : and, when each step was filled