hey were built by the latest of the classical, or the earliest
of the Gothic architects. The little Church in the West had not the
benefit of such models. Places of worship, and cells, or oratories, were
built of timber, turf, or osiers. The biographer of Columba describes
his followers as collecting wattles for the construction of their first
edifice. But they had also a few humble dwellings of stone, which,
naturally enough, had no more resemblance to the proud fanes of the
Romish hierarchy, than the primitive edifices of Mexico and New Zealand
had to those of modern Europe. They were first found in Ireland; more
lately, they have been traced in the Western Isles. They are small rude
domes of rough stone; and if it may seem strange that the form adapted
to the grandest of all architectural achievements should be
accomplished by those rude masons who could not make a Roman arch, it
must be remembered, that while the arch cannot be constructed without
artificial support or scaffolding, a dome on a small scale may, and is
indeed the form to which rude artists, with rude stones, and no other
materials, would naturally be driven. It is that in which boys build
their snow-houses. I shall not easily forget how, once, accompanying a
piscatorial friend on the Loch of Curran, near Ballyskelligs, in Kerry,
I stepped on a small island to visit a Norman ruin there, and saw,
besides the ruin and a stone cross, one of these small rough domes,
testifying, by its venerable simplicity, that it had stood there
centuries before the Norman church beside it. But the peculiar
characteristics of the architecture of the West did not stop short with
these simple types. It advanced, carrying in its advance its own
significant character, until it became mingled with the architecture
propagated from Rome, as the Christian community which worshipped within
the buildings became absorbed in the hierarchy. The Oratory of Galerus,
in Kerry, is a piece of solid, well-conditioned masonry, built after a
plan of no mean symmetry and proportion, yet with scarcely a feature in
common with the early Christian churches of the rest of Europe. Like the
ruder specimens, it struggles for as much solidity and spaciousness as
it can obtain in stonework without the help of the arch, and it makes a
good deal out of the old Egyptian plan of gradually narrowing the
courses of stones inwards, until they come so near that large slabs of
stone can be thrown across the openi