Page:Judging from the past and present, what are the prospects for good architecture in London?.djvu/19

 what they were about, however light or airy may have been the architecture of their houses, when they raised in the middle of their cities, and feared to replace or to build aught else near in rivalry, those huge baseless Doric columns on their massive platform of rock or rocklike masonry, which have braved every destructive effort of nature and of man. And are they not thus doubly beautiful?

Even when not so artistically, are they not monumentally? In this way Rome, by its eclectic style, characterised most especially in the Villa of Adrian, collective, imitative, but on reduced scales, shows herself the mistress of the world in power, but its disciple in the arts.

An additional clear deduction then from observation of the past is this, that wherever monuments have been left us of architectural power and grandeur, these qualities have been exhibited in a characteristic style, according to national types, not varying from age to age; still less from year to year. There was a principle in architecture distinct from taste. The second might change, but the first was invariable. Along the valley of the Nile, from its mouth to Philæ, there runs one order. The type of the Pharaohs and that of the Ptolemies is but one. And so from Athens to Sicily, with a long span of ages, the Doric model binds together the Colonies with their Grecian fatherland.

If our deductions from the past be just, first, that in the public buildings must be laid the seeds of a durable and imperishable architecture, and secondly, that in these should be exhibited a consistent,