throughout Western Europe. We are amazed at the imagination displayed in every design, at the enormous human power employed in their creation; at the wealth which commanded, the consummate science which guided that power; at the profound religious zeal which devoted that power, wealth, and science to these high purposes.

The progress and development of this Christian Architecture, Roman, Byzantine, Romanesque or Lombard, Norman, Gothic in its successive forms, could not be compressed into a few pages: the value of such survey must depend on its accuracy and truth, its accuracy and truth on the multiplicity and fulness of its details and on the fine subtlety of its distinctions, and might seem to demand illustrations from other arts. It is hardly less difficult to express in a narrow compass the religious, hierarchical, and other convergent causes which led to the architectural Christianisation of the West in its two great characteristic forms. These forms may perhaps be best described as Cisalpine (Italian) and Transalpine (Gothic), though neither of them respected. the boundary of the other, and the Teutonic Gothic in the North arose out of the Southern Romanesque.

а

Our former history has surveyed Christian Architecture in its origin; it has traced the primitive form of the churches in the East; so far as they differed in their distribution from the Western, resembling the Pagan rather than the Jewish temple, yet of necessity assuming their own peculiar and distinct character. It has seen in the West the Basilica, the great hall of imperial justice, offering its more commodious plan and arrangements, and becoming with far less alteration a

a

History of Christianity, vol. ii. p. 239. Church of Tyre, described by Eusebius.

Christian edifice for public worship and instruction.b This first epoch of Christian Architecture extended, even after the conversion of Constantine and the building of Constantinople, to the reign of Justinian, under whom Byzantine Architecture, properly so distinguished, drew what may be called the architectural division between the East and the West. Even in Architecture the Greek and Latin Churches were to be oppugnant;. though the Byzantine, as will appear, made a strong effort, and not without partial success, to subjugate the West.

Roman architecture.

To Rome, not to Greece, Christian Architecture owed its great elementary principle, the key-stone, as it were, to all its greatness; and this principle was carried out with infinitely greater boldness and fulness in the West than in the East. And surely it is no fanciful analogy that, as the Roman character contributed so powerfully to the great hierarchical system of the West, so the Roman form of building influenced most extensively Christian Architecture, temporarily and imperfectly that of the East, in perpetuity that of the Latin world. After a few centuries the more dominant hierarchism of the West is manifest in the oppugnancy between Greek and Latin Church Architecture. The East, having once wrought out its architectural type and model, settled down in unprogressive, uncreative acquiescence, and went on copying that type with servile and almost undeviating uniformity. In the West, within certain limits, with certain principles, and with a fixed aim, there was freedom, progression, invention. There was a stately unity, unity which seemed to imply immemorial antiquity, and

b Vol. ii. pp. 340, 343, and vol. iii. p. 373.

to aspire to be an unalterable irrepealable law for perpetuity, in the form and distribution, in the proportions and harmony of the sacred buildings; but in the details, in the height, the dimensions, the character, the ornaments, the mechanical means of support, infinite inexhaustible variety; it ranged from the most bare and naked Romanesque up to the most gorgeous Gothic.

Latin Christianity by its centralisation, its organisation arising out of Roman respect for law and usage, its rigid subordination, its assertion of and its submission to authority, with a certain secondary freedom of action, had constituted its vast ecclesiastical polity; so one great architectural principle carried out in infinite variety and boundless extent, yet in mutual support and mutual dependence, that of the Arch (if not absolutely unknown, of rare and exceptional application among the Greeks), had given solidity and stability to the gigantic structures of Rome, which spread out and soared above each other in ambitious unending rivalry. Hence the power of multiplying harmonious parts, of inclosing space to almost infinite dimensions, of supporting almost in the air the most ponderous roofs, of making a vast

Compare Hope on Architecture, Anastasius. Some corrections, manip. 59. All that has been discovered of the knowledge and use of the Arch in Egypt and in other countries, tends to the same result as that to which Mr. Hope arrived: "The Arch which the Greeks knew not, or if they knew, did not employ." So with other nations. It was first among the Romans an elementary and universal principle of construction. It is impossible not to refer with respect to the first modern philosophical and comprehensive work on Architecture, that by the author of

fold details, much scientific knowledge, have been added by the countless writers on Christian Architecture, of which England has furnished her full share,-Whewell, Willis, Petit, the Author of the Glossary of Architecture, the late Mr. Gally Knight. But who of all these will not own his obligations to Mr. Hope? The recollection of much friendly kindness in my youth enhances the pleasure with which I pay this tribute to a man of real and original genius.

complicated whole, one in design, one in structure, one in effect. The Greek temples and the Roman temples on the Greek model, limited in size and extent by the necessity of finding support for horizontal pressure, were usually isolated edifices, each in its exquisite harmony and perfection, complete, independent, simple. If they were sometimes crowded together, as in the Acropolis of Athens, or the Forum at Rome, yet each stood by itself in its narrow precincts; it was a separate republic, as it were the domain and dwelling of its own God, the hall of its own priesthood.

But through that single principle of the Arch the Roman had attained a grandeur and vastness of construction as yet unknown. It was not like the colossal fanes of Egypt, either rocks hewn into temples, or rocks transported and piled up into temples; or the fabrics supported on the immense monolithic pillars in the Eastern cities (which the Romans themselves in the time of the Antonines and their successors rivalled at Baalbec and Palmyra); nor yet the huge terraced masses of brickwork in the further East. The transcendant and peculiar Architecture of the Romans was seen in their still more vast theatres and amphitheatres, which could contain thousands and thousands of spectators; in their Cæsarean palaces, which were almost cities; in their baths, in which the population of considerable towns, or whole quarters of Rome, found space not for bathing only, but for every kind of recreation and amusement; in their bridges, which spanned the broadest and most turbulent rivers; and their aqueducts, stretching out miles after miles, and conveying plentiful water to the central city. It remained only to apply this simple, universal principle. By resting not the horizontal entablature, but the succession of arches

on the capitals of the pillars, the length might be infinitely drawn out; the roof, instead of being limited in its extent by the length of the rafters, might be vaulted over and so increased enormously in width; and finally, suspended as it were in the air, soar to any height.

the Great.

Christian Architecture, when the world under Constantine became Christian, would of course Constantine begin to display itself more boldly, more ostentatiously. It would aspire to vie with the old religion in the majesty of its temples. Not but that long before it had its public sacred edifices in the East and the West. Still it would be some time before it would confront Paganism, the Paganism of centuries. It must still in vastness and outward grandeur submit to the supremacy of the ancestral temples of the city. The Basilica, too, in its ordinary form, though in its length, height, and proportions there might be a severe and serious grandeur, was plain. A high unadorned wall formed its sides, its front was unbroken but by the portals: it had not its splendid rows of external columns, with their interchanging light and shade; nor the rich and sculptured pediment over its entrance. Constantine, before his departure to the East, erected more than one church, no doubt worthy of an imperial proselyte, for the new religion of the empire. But earthquakes, conflagrations, wars, tumults, the prodigal reverence of some Popes, the vast ambition of others, have left not a vestige of the Constantinian buildings in Rome. The Church of the Lateran, thrown down by an earthquake, was rebuilt by Sergius III. That built in honour of St. Peter (it was asserted and believed over the place

d On the old St. Peter's see the curious work of Bonnani, Historia Templi Vaticani (Roma, 1706), and the elaborate chapter in Bunsen and Platner, Röm's Beschreibung.

VOL. IX.

T