326 MURAL ARCHITECTURE 
brought to bear upon the interests of the present 
hour. Investigations of the first class are prac- 
tical and useful ;—those of the second are purely 
speculative, and are interesting only from the 
halo which antiquity throws over them, and the 
associations with which poetry invests them. The 
former are perhaps more generally and justly the 
favourites in this hall; but surely the latter ought 
not to be too peremptorily excluded; nor ought 
their votaries to acquiesce in such exclusion. 
In asking your attention to a few condensed 
remarks on the most ancient ruins which exist 
in Europe, it must not be supposed that I am pre- 
sumptuous enough to hope that I can throw much 
new light upon a subject which almost every 
successive inquirer has rendered darker than be- 
fore ;—a misfortune which is common to many 
archeological investigations, where each additi- 
onal scrap of information which is raked up from 
the archives of antiquity overthrows an old theory, 
without sufficing to establish a new one on its 
ruins. But, as I found that many of these writers 
had never seen a Pelasgic fortress, and took their 
information on the faith of others, and, that most 
of the travellers who described them had seen 
those of Greece, or those of Italy, exclusively, 
