of the columns at its base to four diameters: In the Tuscan order the intercolumniations were often very wide, the architraves being of wood, and therefore requiring less frequent supports than those of stone. The intercolumniation called the Eustyle, containing two diameters and a quarter, has been in general preferred to any other, by antients as well as moderns, as being both solid and sufficiently open and spacious.

Arches may perhaps be considered as less magnificent than ranges of columns: but they are more solid and very picturesque. Arches are with great propriety employed for a triumphal entrance, the gate of a city, the approach to a noble mansion, and in general in all situations where a wide open admittance is required.

The proportions of an arch vary according to circume stances but the height of the aperture should never much exceed nor fall short of double the breadth; the breadth of the pier should not exceed two thirds nor be less than one third of the breadth of the arch: the thickness ought not to be more than one third nor less than one fourth of that breadth.

It is not unusual to place one order of columns above another; in this case care must be taken to place the strongest in the lower range, thus making the Tuscan support the Doric, the Doric support the Ionic, the Ionic the Corin. thian or Composite, and the Corinthian the Composite. In such ranges, of columns it is usual to make the greater diameter of the upper columns equal to the less diameter of the lower columns, by which arrangement the succession of columns has the air of being one tall tapering tree cut into separate portions.

The principal objection to the architectural distribution of St. Paul's of London is, that the exterior both of the por tico and the body of the edifice is divided into two ranges of columns and pilasters: an arrangement more suitable for

a dwel

a dwelling house in which each range of columns may be supposed to support the several floors into which the house is distributed. This however is to be attributed to the difficulty of procuring blocks of stone of sufficient bulk to allow of columns of greater diameter being cut from them, and not to the want of taste and skill in the architect. The columns and pilasters of the portico and body of St. Peter's of Rome extend at once from the ground to the attic: but then as the intervals between the columns of the portico have been built up and divided into two stories of arcades and windows, the grand effect of such a portico is destroyed, and instead of a magnificent and lofty open range of columns, the spectator is mortified in observing them sunk as it were in a wall, which seems rather to have been built at a later period to give strength and support to the frontispiece ;blemish from which St. Paul's is entirely free.

Columns grouped or clustered, that is placed in pairs, the one by the side of the other, are also improper; for they suggest to the spectator the idea that one range of columns having been originally erected, they were found to be insufficient to support the superincumbent weight, and a second range were introduced to assist in bearing the burthen. Columns in clusters are the productions of mo dern architecture, and have been but too commonly introduced in this as well as other countries.

Instead of employing different ranges of columns, it is usual to throw the ground floor of an edifice into the form of a basement on which stands the order that is to ornament the front. This basement ought never to be in height more than the whole, nor less than the half of the columns or pilasters it is to support. Basements are generally rusticated: that is, the stones are cut and placed so as to resemble the rude blocks as they may be supposed to rise from the quarry: But in this the judgment and taste of the architect are to be displayed: the huge

rusticated

rusticated masses composing the exterior of a Newgate prison, admirably indicate and characterise the nature of the edifice; the less rude it is true, but still rusticated walls of a Carleton-house, are equally incongruous with a delicate and highly ornamented portico, and with the purposes for which that building is set apart.

Pediments were originally used to cover only sacred edifices; but in the end of the Roman republic, when magnificence and luxury had made great progress, they were also applied to private buildings. Pediments are made both triangular and as segments of a circle: the first sort however are not only more natural, as imitating the end of a raised roof, but lighter, of easier construction, and far more picturesque than the second sort. The circular pediment is now seldom seen, excepting over a succession of doors or windows, where it appears alternately with the triangular pediment. In triangular pediments it is customary to make the perpendicular height from one-fourth to one-fifth part of the length of the base. The tympanum, or void space contained within the pediment, is generally appropriated to receive historical or emblematical ornaments in relief.

The observations hitherto made apply only to the Greek and Roman modes of architecture: but there is an other species founded and proceeding on very different principles: this is the Gothic. This term has often been employed to designate all buildings not reducible to any of the five preceding orders: but they are now properly distinguished in this country, according to the supposed periods of their erection, into Saxon, Norman, and Saracenic or modern Gothic. The true Gothic is reckoned to have made its first appearance here in the reign of Henry II. Respecting its origin various opinions have been maintained; some imagining it took its rise from the intersections of the wide semicircular arches observed on the walls of Norman and Saxon buildings, which form an arch of 60 degrees, com

posed

posed of segments or quadrants of circles. Others have believed it was brought to the western parts of Europe from the Holy Land, by persons returning from the crusades. A different origin of Gothic architecture has been entertained by many competent judges, who say that when the Goths became masters of the Spanish peninsula, and gradually adopted the Christian religion already established in the country, having formerly been, like many other unenlightened nations, accustomed to worship the Deity in woods and groves, they endeavoured to imitate those places of worship in the edifices now erected of stone. With what success these northern conquerors executed their project, by the assistance of Saracen architects, whose exotic style of building very luckily suited their purpose, appears from this circumstance that no attentive observer ever viewed a regular avenue of well-grown trees intermixing their branches over his head, but it presently put him in mind of the long vista of a Gothic cathedral; nor ever entered one of the larger and more elegant edifices of that sort, but it presented to his imagination an avenue of trees.

Under this impression of the origin of the Gothic architecture, all the irregular transgressions of art and seeming offences against nature disappear: every thing has its reason and order, and a harmony arises from the application of means adapted to the end. For how could the arches be otherwise than sharp-pointed, when the workmen were to imitate the curve formed by the intersection of the branches of two opposite rows of trees? or how could the columns be otherwise then split into distinct shafts, when they were to represent the stems of a clump of trees growing close together? On the same principles they formed the spreading ramifications of the stone work in the windows, and the stained glass in the interstices; the one to represent the branches, the other the leaves of an opening grove; and

both

both concurred to preserve that gloomy light which, to their untutored minds, inspired religious veneration and dread.

In even the most admired Gothic edifices, no regard seems to have been paid to the proportion between the length of the shaft of a column and its diameter: no rules can be deduced from the Gothic practice, as from that of the Greeks and Romans, to fix the proportions of the columns and its parts; neither are the intercolumniations de termined. Examples of the widest difference in this respect are common, for instance in the nave of York cathedral and in the aisles of the conventual church of Newarkupon-Trent, both Gothic buildings deservedly admired but widely differing the one from the other, both in the proportion of the columns and in the intervals between.

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