groups. It is either Votive, Commemorative, Military, or Commercial. By Votive, I mean all edifices dedicated to the service of Religion; by Commemorative, such structures as the triumphal arches of Rome; all sepulchral monuments from the Pyramids downwards; all buildings, in a word, of which the paramount object is national or personal record.
The term Military needs no explanation.
By Commercial, I mean much of what is commonly called civil architecture: all such works as bridges, exchanges, aqueducts, moles, tunnels, which, however great the original outlay, are undertaken by nations, companies, or individuals, with the ultimate hope of a profitable return.
Now, if it be admitted that the religious sentiment,—the historical instinct, or rather the sense of national greatness, its source,—the military spirit or necessities,—the commercial enterprise and resources of a race, severally determine the character of its Votive, Commemorative, Military, and Commercial architecture,—such monuments mil give us a measure of the relative strength and successive predominance of each of these great motives of national action. Thus, in the chart of universal history, we may more distinctly trace the direction and calculate the force of some of the tides and currents of public opinion by which society has been variously swayed.
In Egypt, Architecture was pre-eminently Votive and Commemorative: in the temples of the Athenian Acropolis, the Votive and the Commemorative were blended, the glory of the individual was merged in that of the state,—the idea of the state was inseparable from that of its religion; the practical genius of the Romans was developed in great works at once Military and Commercial,—roads, bridges, aqueducts, moles, tunnels, fortifications; Votive and Military architecture absorbed the surplus wealth of the Middle Ages; in our own day, the magnificence of our Commercial architecture, of our railway bridges and viaducts,—contrasts somewhat strangely with the stunted and starveling Gothic of our modern churches; but it is fair to remember that the imperious need of an ever increasing population has transferred to charity part of the resources of architecture, and that we must not seek for the Votive investment of the nineteenth century only in its Religious edifices.
