and rectangular vaulting, the Pantheon and Maxentian basilica, and have furnished a framework for the Middle Ages, which might have been wrought into still more august structures than the finest existing cathedral. But it may be doubted whether the Roman himself could have matured a style to rival the Gothic. The medieval architects first in Europe united the constructive and artistic faculty in a high degree, and the coexistence of the double talent produced a more captivating mixture of the vast and the ethereal, of engineering science and poetic forms, of religious solemnity and jewelled richness than could have proceeded from the gross and one-sided Roman mind.

The smaller works of the Romans, their pillars of victory and triumphal arches, have been so often repeated that they might be supposed to be exceptions to the general failure of their decorative efforts; but they are among their faultiest productions, and the numerous copies must be ascribed to the poverty of modern invention, much more than to the merit of the antique examples. The Romans,' says Mr. Fergusson, when speaking of the pillars of victory, 'never rose above the idea of taking a column of construction, magnifying it, and placing it on a pedestal without any attempt to modify its details, or hide the original utilitarian purpose for which the pillar was designed.' They perceived, nevertheless, that an isolated pillar without a function would be ludicrous, and, in order to invest it with the semblance of a purpose, they put upon it a portrait statue which, by being perched aloft where it was barely visible, involved a senseless contradiction. In Trajan's Column there was the further absurdity of a spiral bas-relief twisted about the shaft like a bandage, and representing the incidents of his wars against Decebalus. The curious spectator who desired to profit by the sculptures had to walk round and round the corkscrew composition, endeavouring with confused and aching eyes to follow the winding procession. The Roman never understood that what is repugnant to reason cannot satisfy taste. With him to enrich a surface was to adorn it. The triumphal arches have the germs of beauty, but none of the Roman specimens are satisfactory. A rectangular block is not the best form, and the heavy attics on the top are clumsy and oppressive. The ornamentation, as might be expected, is not in keeping with the construction. The inevitable columns are set on tall pedestals to support a line of entablature, which breaks round the capitals; and the design, as Mr. Fergusson observes, is frittered away by this ostentatious envelope of useless props and cut-up cornices. These persistent errors of the Roman style have led many critics to condemn it in

the

the mass, but its great and original qualities fairly justify its

renown.

Already in the time of Constantine the arts were tending to decay. The rise of Byzantium hastened their downfall at Rome. Imperial wealth in the Western capital was no longer devoted to rearing imperial edifices. The business of building passed over to the Christians, who pursued it with humbler aspirations, with diminished means, and with inferior workmen. They had neither the science nor the money with which to construct colossal domes and vaults, and their architecture is not the continuation and expansion of the style immediately preceding. The heathen temples were their quarries, and the character of their buildings was determined by the nature of their ready-made materials, by the degree of skill in their artisans, and by the amount of funds at their command. They both retrograded and advanced, and the combined effects produced a new phase of the Roman style, which Mr. Fergusson terms Romanesque. In violation of sound nomenclature, the appellation has sometimes been given to the early round-arched Gothic, which never took root at Rome, and was not invented by Romans. It was fashioned by a new people, in a new country, into new forms; and if our Norman is to be named after Rome, because in its origin it was an off-set from Roman architecture, the Parthenon,' says Mr. Fergusson, ought to be called Egyptianesque, and the Ionic temple at Ephesus Assyrianesque.' When architecture assumes a distinct national style, its title should be in accordance with the fact, and not imply that it was a mere appendage to some previous type.

6

The Romans, following in the wake of the Etruscans, erected circular tombs. Originally, says Mr. Fergusson, the sepulchral chamber bore but a small proportion to the solid mass which surrounded it. The interiors were gradually enlarged, and in the age of Constantine they had grown to be 'miniature Pantheons.' Mr. Fergusson remarks that there was a natural association between the monuments of the dead and a religion which had been nurtured in persecution and martyrdom. The tombs were the pattern for many primitive churches, and Mr. Fergusson is of opinion that there alone, at the outset, were performed the public sacred rites; that there the noviciates were baptised; that there the brethren partook of the Supper of the Lord; and that there the burial service was read over departed saints. In the history of architecture these circular edifices are of subordinate interest. They were not the principal Christian buildings at Rome; they did not retain their exclusive prerogative as churches; and they did not become the model for future ages. They have

almost

almost entirely perished, and the scanty ruins which remain are of uncertain date. When of considerable diameter, they were divided into aisles by inner circles of columns and roofed with wood.

While the round church, according to Mr. Fergusson's view, was the sole sacramental temple' of the Roman Christians, the basilica was appropriated to their secular assemblies. The bishop took the chair of the magistrate in the apse, his clergy sat on the benches which lined the circumference, and the laity stood in the nave. When the building came to be used for a house of prayer, the Christian altar was put in the same position which the Pagan altar had occupied before, and its sacred precincts were set apart for the clergy. They afterwards extended the privileged ground to some distance in front of the apse. The whole formed a raised platform, which was separated from the rest of the church by pillars called cancelli. This is the origin of our English term 'chancel.' The space in cathedrals is not named from the screen which railed it off, but is termed the presbytery from the persons to whom it was assigned. Next to the presbytery was the choir,-a species of church within a church, or enclosure of a portion of the nave for religious services. Mr. Fergusson thinks that the full plan was established by the fourth or fifth century. But we are less concerned at present with these liturgical arrangements than with the features which display to us the Christian architecture of ancient Rome.

Before the great days of intersecting vaults Trajan had built, about A.D. 100, a basilica with a wooden roof. Its ground-plan and dimensions were imitated by the Christians in the basilica of St. Peter, which belongs to about A.D. 330, and in the basilica of St. Paul, which belongs to about A.D. 386. St. Peter's was removed in the fifteenth century to make way for its celebrated successor; and St. Paul's was burnt down in 1822. Exact measurements and drawings exist of both. They were nearly the same size, or 380 feet in length by 212 feet in breadth. Like the basilica of Trajan, they were divided by four rows of columns into five aisles, and the central aisle or nave was 80 feet wide. In the basilica of Trajan there were probably double aisles at the ends as well as at the sides, for the columns are believed to have been disposed in the form of two complete parallelograms. In the Christian basilicas the columns are confined to the sides, but, stopping short at some distance from the apsidal extremity, there is, in effect, a single broad cross aisle at the upper end. The cross aisle in St. Paul's is of equal width with the nave. Here we have the commencement of the mediæval transept, which, when the choir was joined to the presbytery, was placed

lower

lower down the central aisle, that it might still be the line of division between the inner sanctuary and the outer church.

The woodcut represents the central aisle of St. Paul's, and will show the particulars in which architecture had lost and gained. The Greek and the Etruscan systems were reconciled

View of the interior of St. Paul's, at Rome, before the fire.

by adopting half of each. The column was put in the place of the pier of the arch, and the arch was put in the place of the entablature of the column. The section of the entablature which was set upon the capitals in the Maxentian basilica has disappeared in St. Paul's, and the construction is relieved from its lingering anomalies.* For the three huge tunnels of 72 feet span, we have a line of small arches, and it becomes palpable that number in architecture may prevail over size. The broad cross-aisle which ran in front of the apse was happily devised to

*The arcades in the court-yard of Diocletian's palace at Spalatro have not any bits of entablature on the capitals, and there may have been precedents equally early at Rome. The designer of the palace can hardly have been influenced by constructive propriety, since he has used the entablature with complete inconsistency in other parts of the building. Several of the columns of St. Paul's are said to have been transferred from the mausoleum of Hadrian, which was circular, and the difficulty and expense of working a new and straight entablature may have been the reason that arches of a cheap and easy construction were substituted. The columns in the central aisle of the basilica of St. Peter had an entablature and no arches.

confer

confer importance upon the end of the basilica and cause it to terminate in a climax. The Gothic cathedrals miss this beauty. Their principal point of grandeur,' says Mr. Fergusson, 'is half-way down the church, at the intersection with the transept;' and the impression is weakened by the inferior proportions into which the building relapses along the choir and presbytery. It would be a mistake to ascribe every merit in the Christian basilicas to the taste and judgment of constructors who could take columns of different orders from the temples and rank them together. A more barbarous discord could not be imagined. The vista of arches might have been due to necessity rather than choice. The Christians would probably have preferred the Maxentian basilica and its vaults, but they were not equal to the achievement. In abandoning the large arches they fell into the opposite error, and made their arches so narrow that they are too insignificant for pillars 33 feet in height. Lintels of stone must be short, or they would snap in the middle; and the builders of the basilica, regardless of the meanness which results with the arch, put the columns as close as when they carried entablatures. A second deformity would have been alleviated by a suitable span. The increased rise of the arch would have diminished the excess of wall which was heaped over the openings for the purpose of accommodating the height of the church to the width, and of affording room for a clerestory by elevating the nave above the roof of the aisles. The disproportion of the solids to the voids was of a piece with the general want of keeping. The arches were without mouldings, and their poverty contrasts harshly with the richness of the columns. The clerestory and roof were rude and bare, and the ugly exterior was composed of plain brick walls and plain arch-headed windows. The magnitude of the basilicas seems to indicate some conception of architectural grandeur; but everything beautiful in the details had been dragged from the temples, and the rest might have been the work of village masons and carpenters. The parts which furnish hints for an improvement on previous designs would seem to have been chiefly the compulsory product of circumstances, and were certainly accompanied by an insensibility to harmony, by an incapacity for invention, and by clumsiness of execution.

A gallery looking into the nave was placed over the aisles in the basilica of Trajan; and, unless they were hampered by the want of a second tier of columns to support the roof of the gallery, it is singular that the builders of St. Peter's and St. Paul's should not have preferred the system to their tall unsightly wall. The arrangement was here and there adopted later of interposing

a gallery