tary shafts (especially as it is always unsafe
to lay a stratified stone with its beds upright) they have been frequently
composed of two or more short shafts set upon each other, and to conceal
the unsightly junction, a flat stone has been interposed, carved into
certain mouldings, which have the appearance of a ring on the shaft. Now
observe: the whole pier was the gathering of the whole wall, the base
gathers into base, the veil into the shaft, and the string courses of
the veil gather into these rings; and when this is clearly expressed,
and the rings do indeed correspond with the string courses of the wall
veil, they are perfectly admissible and even beautiful; but otherwise,
and occurring, as they do in the shafts of Westminster, in the middle of
continuous lines, they are but sorry make-shifts, and of late since gas
has been invented, have become especially offensive from their unlucky
resemblance to the joints of gas-pipes, or common water-pipes. There are
two leaden ones, for instance, on the left hand as one enters the abbey
at Poet's Corner, with their solderings and funnels looking exactly like
rings and capitals, and most disrespectfully mimicking the shafts of
the abbey, inside.

Thus far we have traced the probable conditions of shaft structure in
pure theory; I shall now lay before the reader a brief statement of the
facts of the thing in time past and present.

Sec. XXIII. In the earliest and grandest shaft architecture which we know,
that of Egypt, we have no grouped arrangements, properly so called, but
either single and smooth shafts, or richly reeded and furrowed shafts,
which represent the extreme conditions of a complicated group bound
together to sustain a single mass; and are indeed, without doubt,
nothing else than imitations of bundles of reeds, or of clusters of
lotus:[42] but in these shafts there is merely the idea of a group, not
the actual function or structure of a group; they are just as much solid
and simple shafts as those which are smooth, and merely by the method of
their decoration present to the eye the image of a richly complex
arrangement.

Sec. XXIV. After these we have the Greek shaft, less in scale, and losing
all suggestion or purpose of suggestion of complexity, its so-called
flutings being, visibly as actually, an external decoration.

Sec. XXV. The idea of the shaft remains absolutely single in the Roman
and Byzantine mind; but true grouping begins in Christian archite