thenon is not most beautiful, and the monuments of Egypt most sublime.
In fact, considering architecture as a fine art, as the solid record of the power, genius, and thought of a people, we may say that when a nation or a race has reached the height of its civilization, according to its own self-created type, its indigenous, home-bred, time-matured culture, and then by its buildings gives expression to its principles and its feelings, with all the impressiveness which it commands, what it produces cannot fail to be beautiful in connection with these manifestations. In Egypt the feelings of servile awe and abject submission of a people towards a monarchy and a priesthood may be read in the wasteful magnificence of its pyramids, in the costly vanity of its obelisks, and in the gloomy mysticism of its temples. The elegance of mind and polished manners, eloquence and poetry of tongue in Greece, are all built uj) imperishably in Parian marble. The rude energy, perseverance, and the conqueror's power to make others' skill subserve its own deficiencies, which marked the Roman character from its kings to its Cæsars, manifest themselves from the massive blocks of its great drain, or the substructions of the Capitol, to the Corinthian columns of the Forum or the Pantheon.
And so, while the monuments of India, of Persia, of Assyria, of all the East, clearly represent a state of tyranny in peace and of savageness in war, the West, by its multiplied theatres, its palatial baths, its many basilicas or justice-halls, no less describes the condition of a relaxed, luxurious, and voluptuous
