memorials as exclusively of one class; secondly, I have described them as beautiful.
I have, indeed, only mentioned the buildings of Pæstum and of Sicily, which are all public buildings, temples, theatres, walls, reservoirs, and tombs, for these last must be considered as having been under public guardianship. But further investigation will verify the validity of this statement.
What remains of Athens but its Erychtheum, its Temple of the Winds, its splendid Parthenon and other public edifices? Where are the houses of Pericles, or of Plato, or Demosthenes, or of any other of her worthies? Not a wall, however solidly built, has been left standing. And along that line of colossal monuments which is threaded by the Nile, temples, pyramids, and Memnoniums, with their carvings, and even their paintings, fresh without and within them, is there one single private building, from a cottage to a princely mansion, remaining; though, no doubt, hundreds and thousands of dwellings must have been built and rebuilt, to furnish workmen for these sumptuous edifices and princes to command their erection?
And so of Tadmor or Palmyra, and so of Balbek, and so of Persepolis, and so finally of Ellora, and the Indian cavern-temples, vast and solid—nay, sometimes elegant and slender, but always public—edifices are all that have outlived the destructive powers of man and of nature; and they appear so totally separated from the men, or even the race that constructed them, that we are tempted to adopt the prevailing superstition of the East, that not men,
