the admirers of Aeschylus and Thucydides. With the revived statues of
Greece appear the most beautiful pictures ever produced by the hand of
man; and with pictures and statues architecture receives a new
development. It is the blending of the old Greek and Roman with the
Gothic, and is called the Renaissance. Michael Angelo erects St.
Peter's, the heathen Pantheon, on the intersection of Gothic nave and
choir and transept; a glorious dome, more beautiful than any Gothic
spire or tower, rising four hundred and fifty feet into the air. And in
the interior are classic circular arches and pillars, so vast that one
is impressed as with great feats of engineering skill. All that is
variegated in marbles adorns the altars; all that is bewitching in
paintings is transferred to mosaics. And this new style of Italy spreads
into France and England. Sir Christopher Wren builds St. Paul's,--more
Grecian than Gothic,--and fills London with new churches, not one of
which is Gothic, and all different. The brain is bewildered in
attempting to classify the new and ever-shifting forms of the revived
Italian. And so for three hundred years the architects mingle the Gothic
with the classical, until now a mongrel architecture is the disgrace of
Europe; varied but not expressive, resting on no settled principles,
neither on vertical nor on horizontal lines,--blended together,
sometimes Grecian porticos on Elizabethan structures, spires resting not
on towers but roofs, Byzantine domes on Grecian temples, Greek columns
with Lombard arches, flamboyant panelling, pendant pillars from the
roof, all styles mixed up together, Corinthian pilasters acting as
Gothic buttresses, and pointed arches with Doric friezes,--a heap of
diverse forms, alien alike from the principles of Wykeham and Vitruvius.

And this varied mongrel style of architecture corresponds with the
confused civilization of the period,--neither Greek nor Gothic, but a
mixture of both; intolerant priests wrangling with pagan sceptics and
infidels,--Aquaviva with Pascal, the hierarchy of the French Church with
Voltaire and Rousseau, Protestant divines with the Catholic clergy;
Geneva and Rome compromising at Oxford, the authority of the Fathers
made antagonistic to the authority of popes, new vernacular tongues
supplanting Latin in the universities; everywhere war on the Middle
Ages, without full emancipation from their dogmas, ancient paganism made
to uphold the Church, an unbounded activ