early settlement, or consecrated by
the purity of rural life. The whole system of Swiss and German Gothic
has thus been most characteristically affected by the structure of the
intersecting timbers at the angles of the chalet. This was in some cases
directly and without variation imitated in stone, as in the piers of the
old bridge at Aarburg; and the practice obtained--partially in the
German after-Gothic--universally, or nearly so, in Switzerland--of
causing moldings which met at an angle to appear to interpenetrate each
other, both being truncated immediately beyond the point of
intersection. The painfulness of this ill-judged adaptation was
conquered by association--the eye became familiarized to uncouth forms
of tracery--and a stiffness and meagerness, as of cast-iron, resulted in
the moldings of much of the ecclesiastical, and all the domestic Gothic
of central Europe; the moldings of casements intersecting so as to form
a small hollow square at the angles, and the practice being further
carried out into all modes of decoration--pinnacles interpenetrating
crockets, as in a peculiarly bold design of archway at Besancon. The
influence at Venice has been less immediate and more fortunate; it is
with peculiar grace that the majestic form of the ducal palace reminds
us of the years of fear and endurance when the exiles of the Prima
Venetia settled like home-less birds on the sea-sand, and that its
quadrangular range of marble wall and painted chamber, raised upon
multiplied columns of confused arcade,[6] presents but the exalted image
of the first pile-supported hut that rose above the rippling of the
lagoons.

32. In the chapter on the "Influence of Habit and Religion," of Mr.
Hope's Historical Essay,[7] the reader will find further instances of
the same feeling, and, bearing immediately on our present purpose, a
clear account of the derivation of the Egyptian temple from the
excavated cavern; but the point to which in all these cases we would
direct especial attention, is, that the first perception of the great
laws of architectural _proportion_ is dependent for its acuteness less
on the aesthetic instinct of each nation than on the mechanical
conditions of stability and natural limitations of size in the primary
type, whether hut, chalet, or tent.

As by the constant reminiscence of the natural proportions of his first
forest-dwelling, the Greek would be restrained from all inordinate
exaggeration of size--the Eg