ch one, the dangerous weight of snow on
flat roofs, has been candidly acknowledged by our author), and directed
by the tendency, common to humanity in all ages, to push every
newly-discovered means of delight to its most fantastic extreme, to
exhibit every newly-felt power in its most admirable achievement, and to
load with intrinsic decoration forms whose essential varieties have been
exhausted. The arch, carelessly struck out by the Etruscan, forced by
mechanical expediencies on the unwilling, uninventive Roman, remained
unfelt by either. The noble form of the apparent Vault of Heaven--the
line which every star follows in its journeying, extricated by the
Christian architect from the fosse, the aqueduct, and the sudarium--grew
into long succession of proportioned colonnade, and swelled into the
white domes that glitter above the plain of Pisa, and fretted channels
of Venice, like foam globes at rest.

37. But the spirit that was in these Aphrodites of the earth was not
then, nor in them, to be restrained. Colonnade rose over colonnade; the
pediment of the western front was lifted into a detached and scenic
wall; story above story sprang the multiplied arches of the Campanile,
and the eastern pyramidal fire-type, lifted from its foundation, was
placed upon the summit. With the superimposed arcades of the principal
front arose the necessity, instantly felt by their subtle architects, of
a new proportion in the column; the lower wall inclosure, necessarily
for the purposes of Christian worship continuous, and needing no
peristyle, rendered the lower columns a mere facial decoration, whose
proportions were evidently no more to be regulated by the laws hitherto
observed in detached colonnades. The column expanded into the shaft, or
into the huge pilaster rising unbanded from tier to tier; shaft and
pilaster were associated in ordered groups, and the ideas of singleness
and limited elevation once attached to them, swept away for ever; the
stilted and variously centered arch existed already: the pure ogive
followed--where first exhibited we stay not to inquire;--finally, and
chief of all, the great mechanical discovery of the resistance of
lateral pressure by the weight of the superimposed flanking pinnacle.
Daring concentrations of pressure upon narrow piers were the immediate
consequence, and the recognition of the buttress as a feature in itself
agreeable and susceptible of decoration. The glorious art of painting on
glas