as also of wooden timbers, in the
use of which the Romans were not skilled, and which do not really
pertain to architecture: an imposing edifice must always be constructed
of stone or brick. The arch also enabled the Romans to economize in the
use of costly marbles, of which they were very fond, as well as of other
stones. Some of the finest columns were made of Egyptian granite, very
highly polished.

The extensive application of the arch doubtless led to the deterioration
of the Grecian architecture, since it blended columns with arcades, and
thus impaired the harmony which so peculiarly marked the temples of
Athens and Corinth; and as taste became vitiated with the decline of
the empire, monstrous combinations took place, which were a great fall
from the simplicity of the Parthenon and the interior of the Pantheon.

But whatever defects marked the age of Diocletian and Constantine, it
can never be questioned that the Romans carried architecture to a
perfection rarely attained in our times. They may not have equalled the
severe simplicity of their teachers the Greeks, but they surpassed them
in the richness of their decorations, and in all buildings designed for
utility, especially in private houses and baths and theatres.

The Romans do not seem to have used other than semicircular arches. The
Gothic, or Pointed, or Christian architecture, as it has been variously
called, was the creation of the Middle Ages, and arose almost
simultaneously in Europe after the first Crusade, so that it would seem
to be of Eastern origin. But it was a graft on the old Roman arch, in
the curve of the ellipse rather than the circle.

Aside from this invention of the arch, to which we are indebted for the
most beautiful ecclesiastical structures ever erected, we owe everything
in architecture to the Greeks and Romans. We have found out no new
principles which were not known to Vitruvius. No one man was the
inventor or creator of the wonderful structures which ornamented the
cities of the ancient world. We have the names of great architects, who
reared various and faultless models, but they all worked upon the same
principles, and these can never be subverted; so that in architecture
the ancients are our schoolmasters, whose genius we revere the more we
are acquainted with their works. What more beautiful than one of those
grand temples which the cultivated heathen Greeks erected to the worship
of their unknown gods!--the graduated and