Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/447

Rh that apparent strength requisite to support the high wall placed over the pillars. The order, too, was finer and more important than at St. Peter's, twenty-four of the pillars being taken from some temple or building (it is generally said the mausoleum of Hadrian) of the best age of Rome, though the remaining sixteen were unfortunately only very bad copies of them. These pillars are 33 feet in height, or one-third of the whole height of the building to the roof. In St. Peter's they were only a fourth, and if they had been spaced a little farther apart,

and the arch made more important, the most glaring defect of these buildings would in a great measure have been avoided. Long before its destruction by fire in 1822 this church had been so altered as to lose many of its most striking peculiarities. The bema or presbytery was divided into two by a longitudinal wall. The greater number of its clerestory windows were built up, its atrium gone, and decay and whitewash had done much to efface its beauty, which, nevertheless, seems to have struck all travellers with admiration, as combining in itself the last reminiscence of Pagan Rome with the earliest forms of the Christian world. It certainly was the most interesting, if not quite the most beautiful, of the Christian buildings of that city.