speech, still the disadvantage of the prisoner is great. The accusation is stated in lucid order and skilful arrangement ;the story is told in that connected and dove-tailed manner, which the education and experience of a lawyer so particularly confer. The prisoner, on the other hand, has to answer this without any professional assistance. From the very nature of the large majority of criminal cases-those of theft-the accused party is nearly always in the lower, and thence more uneducated, classes of society. I do not say this from any aristocratical idea of the inferior morality of the poor ;-but their offences are necessarily those which come under the cognizance of the laws. Their temptations are of an order wholly different from ours ;-and till we resist our own, we have no right to call ourselves morally superior to those whose aberrations lead to graver consequence. A rich man,—or a man who without being rich, is in the condition of a gentleman,-has no temptation to steal, or to commit any of those violences which arise from similar causes;-his vices are of a different nature. Hence it is nearly always a person the most unfitted for such tasks, who is called upon to sift, compare, and contrast evidence,-and, in all other points, to oppose the exerted talents of the most able and educated men ;-men too, whose whole lives have been devoted to the study of such matters. It is sometimes said that the Judge is the Prisoner's counsel;-but this is far from being true; and it would be extremely wrong if it were so. What does it amount to ?that the Judge acts as advocate to one of the parties. I am at a loss to understand how this is reconcilable with the rigid uprightness which ought ever to characterize the Judgmentseat.

From what principle this most extraordinary practice arose, I am utterly unable to conceive. It was carried, however, much farther in former times, when a person accused of felony was not permitted to call any witnesses on his behalf! -This has long been abolished,-and truly the present regulation might have been swept away with it, and not left to disgrace the nineteenth century. I use the word disgrace in its strongest sense;-for, unlike many absurd and unjust statutes which remain dormant, this law is in daily practice; —and, unlike many evil practices, which continue from year to year without much notice or any comment,-nearly every Session of Parliament a motion is made on this very subjectand resisted on the score of innovation!—I will not trust myself with any remarks on this part of the question.

But I have filled my paper; and still I could tell my readers, if they wished it, a great deal more of what is to be seen at

"the Old Bailey." I could speak of the infinite shades and varieties of error, and misery, and crime. I could describe the levity of one class the reckless and hardened insensibility of another-and the thrilling and terrible despair of a third. I could tell of the shocking pathos which is caused by the mingling of Woman in scenes where nothing but coarse passion and foul crime is seen-and where Woman, therefore, it were to be hoped, should never find a place. I could tell of the shame of friends, and the relenting even of foes;-of the wronged imploring mercy for the wronger, and (often, alas !) imploring it in vain. I could represent the dreadful anxiety of accused guilt, and its still more dreadful despair under conviction. I could speak of that terrible sentence which makes even the utterer shudder-which shuts out this world for ever from the criminal's agonized view, and places before it that other for which his destiny is so instant-for which his unfitness is so extreme. But these things merit and demand both individualization and detail-and, at this moment, I have time and space for neither. Perhaps I may turn my mirror this way again.

ON THE SIXTH, OR BOOTIAN ORDER OF
ARCHITECTURE.

Palaces here, even those which remain unfinished, display a taste chastened by the study of ancient art. Their beauty originates in the design, and is never superinduced by ornament. Their elevations enchant you, not by the length and altitude, nor by the materials and sculpture, but by the consummate elicity of their proportions, by the harmonious distribution of void and solid, by THAT HAPPY SOMETHING BETWEEN FLAT AND PROMINENT, which charms both in front and profile; by that maëstria which calls in columns not to incumber but support, and reproduces ANCIENT BEAUTY IN COMBINATIONS UNKNOWN TO THE ANCIENTS THEMSELVES.-FORSYTH.

WE are not aware that Pancirollus, in his celebrated “ History of memorable things lost," has treated of the misfortune which the world has laboured under, during two thousand years, in the annihilation of the Sixth or Boeotian order of architecture. The destruction of Thebes by Alexander was one of those profanations which too often mark the course of the conqueror; and though he offered some small tribute to intellect, in preserving the house in which Pindar was born, it might have been more truly advantageous to the world had he

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spared some of the magnificent monuments of that great city. There has occasionally prevailed an opinion amongst the learned that Thebes was distinguished for ancient buildings, whose remains would have offered specimens of architectural style perfectly distinct from those which are classed under the general title of The five orders." It has been proved by almost incontestible evidence, in the works of the learned Vander Von Bluggen, in his chapter on Capitals, (vide Editio Amstel. 15 vol. fol.) that there was a sixth order of architecture existing at Thebes, which, xar' ¿1⁄2ox, was called THE BOOTIAN. The scarcity of this treatise of Vander Von Bluggen, which is only to be found in the rare folio edition, may probably afford a reason why neither Palladio, Scammozzi, Vignola, Perrault, &c., should have been so perfectly ignorant of this remarkable fact; but it is not so easy to account for the silence of Vitruvius on this subject. We fear that we must refer his silence to that jealousy, sometimes personal, sometimes patriotic, which has been a distinguishing characteristic of artists in all ages and countries; nor is it, upon the common principles of human nature, to be felt as a matter of surprise that Vitruvius should have been willing to leave to Rome as much originalityas could, without fear of detection, be assigned to her in the institution of the Composite order. We cannot for a moment admit that the details of the Boeotian order, by Vander Von Bluggen, are founded on an ingenious hypothesis alone. He has shewn most distinctly, upon historical authorities and inferences, which appeared to us perfectly satisfactory, that the ancient fable of Cadmus has always been misunderstood: that, like many of the most beautiful passages of heathen mythology, it is an allegory which has reference to the actual circumstances of the ancient world; that the attack of Cadmus upon the dragon, and his triumph over it, by the assistance of Minerva, distinctly records the first victory of science over ignorance; that the sowing of the dragon's teeth in the plain was the scattering of the seeds of knowledge amongst the vulgar; that the springing up of armed men, and their contest with each other, is an appropriate illustration of the evils of knowledge, when undirected by reason; and that the destruction of all except five, who assisted him in building Thebes, typifies the successful application of knowledge to the arts, after the agitation had subsided which marked its first improvident dissemination. The analogy which Vander Von Bluggen has established between this fable and the scriptural account of the destruction of the tower of Babel is particularly curious. In the literal application of the allegory to the state of art and science in early Greece, his constant reference to the number six, as

as typified in Cadmus and his five associates, is very singular. He proves that in the time of Cadmus the Muses were six in number; previous to that time they had been only four: he enlarges upon the perfection of the properties of the six-sided figure, called the hexagon. After three other illustrations of the superstitious veneration attached to the number six, he concludes his sextile series by demonstrations that there were six orders of architecture in Thebes; that five of these, typified by the five associates of Cadmus, have come down to modern times, with many transformations both in figure and name; but that the sixth, which he designates as the Cadmean or Bœotian, had been entirely lost for nineteen centuries, until he, the learned Vander Von Bluggen, had, by one of those fortunate accidents which seldom occur in the life of a scholar, obtained an ancient MS. which furnished many details of parts of the order. The narrative states that he had further had the good fortune, after a most painful and expensive research, to discover on the scite of ancient Thebes four fragments of an acroter, and a very minute specimen of a column, which, with a Dutch idea of ordinary things, he compares to a mop-stick, (basin-stock,) which enabled him distinctly to trace all the proportions and other great characteristics of this superlative order.

It is evident from the history of architecture that there has always been a great struggle, since the decay of the Roman empire, to burst the limits which the five orders had imposed upon invention. The prevailing styles of the middle ages, in every country, offer constant proofs of this fact. Nor has the same desire been less ardent in times approaching to our own, and even in our own country and our own age.

The French Academy offered a munificent prize to the inventor of a sixth order; and the numberless competitors for this prize produced, in their highest flights, nothing beyond the substitution of the Gallic cock for the Grecian volute; to the mysteries of proportion, as we shall see exemplified in the Boeotian order, they were utterly blind. At the latter end of the last century, a laborious provincial architect of this country, dazzled by the splendour of regal employment, felt his inventive genius so encouraged that he published an elaborate work on his discovery of the sixth, or as he designates it," The Georgian order;" but alas! his pretensions were of so slight a texture that a bon mot of His late Majesty consigned the Georgian order to all but the oblivion of a joke, even after it had been embodied in the portico of a Nabob. It would be tedious to record the phlegmatic speculations of the German, or the frigid attempts of the Russian, architects.

Upon this subject all have gone wrong, because all have believed that this great problem was to be solved by invention, and not by research; they should have sought for the lost Pleiad, instead of endeavouring to re-create her. Guided by the strong light of reason and analogy, the learned Vander Von Bluggen, in the fifteenth century, discovered that a sixth order had existed, in discovering the Baotian. The still higher glory has been reserved for a greater genius of our times and country, to drag forth from the dust of obscurity the germs of this remarkable portion of the art, and to give it

"a local habitation."

not a name,* in the metropolis of the empire.

We are quite aware that the whole world of British art is perfectly unacquainted with the great name of Vander Von Bluggen. Through our national prejudices, there is something even startling in the name itself; however it may appear associated with the erudite, it seems to have a very slight connexion with the tasteful. The non-euphony of this name may originally have furnished to the professor of architecture an adequate motive not to suddenly introduce it to the notice of the public; and to prudently wait until the merits of the Boeotian order should have been so apparent to the world, that the channel by which it was perpetuated from antiquity should be dispassionately looked upon, without any of the odium which is attached to the unfamiliar combinations of vowels and consonants. This hypothesis may in some degree explain why the Boeotian order has always been considered as an invention of the professor, and not a revival. At any rate it is certain that the professor has not himself announced the sources of his information; and though we may expect from his candour that he will at least leave to the world a posthumous edition of the treatise of Von Bluggen, with his own valuable illustrations, we must consider it both prudent and patriotic that he has led his country to a due appreciation of the merits of the order, by his own successful practice, in preference to the publication of a dry theory.

Having thus detailed, as briefly as possible, the mode in which this extraordinary relic of antiquity has been preserved to the modern world, it will be our duty, with the same strict regard to historical truth, and with the smallest degree of technical phraseology, which the subject will permit, to point

;

* The name was of course contemporaneous, or nearly so, with the order but we believe that it was first promulgated in this country by Sir James Macintosh, whose extensive researches and correspondence may, perhaps, have led him to a knowledge of Vander Von Bluggen's rare work.

VOL. II. PART II.

2 G