implicity to
have been chosen (some say, built) for its last and lonely habitation,
by a mind of softest passion as of purest thought; and to have sheltered
its silent old age among the blue and quiet hills, till it passed away
like a deep lost melody from the earth, leaving a light of peace about
the gray tomb at which the steps of those who pass by always falter, and
around this deserted, and decaying, and calm habitation of the thoughts
of the departed; Petrarch's, at Arqua. A more familiar instance of the
application of these arches is the Villa of Mecaenas at Tivoli, though it
is improperly styled a villa, being pretty well known to have been
nothing but stables.

138. The buttress is the only remaining point worthy of notice. It
prevails to a considerable extent among the villas of the south, being
always broad and tall, and occasionally so frequent as to give the
building, viewed laterally, a pyramidal and cumbrous effect. The most
usual form is that of a simple sloped mass, terminating in the wall,
without the slightest finishing, and rising at an angle of about 84 deg..
Sometimes it is perpendicular, sloped at the top into the wall; but it
never has steps of increasing projection as it goes down. By observing
the occurrence of these buttresses, an architect, who knew nothing of
geology, might accurately determine the points of most energetic
volcanic action in Italy; for their use is to protect the building from
the injuries of earthquakes, the Italian having far too much good taste
to use them, except in cases of extreme necessity. Thus, they are never
found in North Italy, even in the fortresses. They begin to occur among
the Apennines, south of Florence; they become more and more frequent and
massy towards Rome; in the neighborhood of Naples they are huge and
multitudinous, even the walls themselves being sometimes sloped; and the
same state of things continues as we go south, on the coast of Calabria
and Sicily.

139. Now, these buttresses present one of the most extraordinary and
striking instances of the beauty of adaptation of style to locality and
peculiarity of circumstance, that can be met with in the whole range of
architectural investigation. Taken in the abstract, they are utterly
detestable, formal, clumsy, and apparently unnecessary. Their builder
thinks so himself: he hates them as things to be looked at, though he
erects them as things to be depended upon. He has no idea that there is
any pro