82 On the Fine Arts. 
Ministers, as the fine arts themselves, which we consider as 
entirely devoted to the excitement of agreeable emotions. 
Of all the arts, that which most voluminously attracts at- 
tention is the artof building. Invented in the country and 
brought to perfection in the town, it owes its origin, like all 
other human contrivances, to necessity. Man, naked at bis 
birth, thrown upon the earth exposed to the cold, the wet, 
and the heat, and to the concussion of other bodies, was 
constrained to seek artificial means of protection. The 
rain obliged him to fly for shelter to trees and caverns, the 
only habitations with which Nature has provided her fa- 
vourite ; for in the improvable faculties bestowed on his 
mind she furnished him with the means of constructing 
abodes suitable to himself, suitable to the growth of his 
wants by the improvement of his condition. The same 
instinct which led him to take refuge from the shower, 
taught him to prefer those trees of which the branches were 
thickest interwoven, and, when they were insufficient, to 
draw the boughs closer over his head. The process of 
reasoning from this experience, to the considerations which 
led him to form permanent bowers, requires no illustration. 
Every hypothesis formed to account for the various styles 
of architecyire, ascribes them to the structures which the 
inhabitants of the countries in which they respectively ori- 
ginated first raiged. The aisles of the Gothic cathedral, 
and that rich fattage of carving with which its vaults are 
overspread, cannot be seen without immediately suggesting 
the idea of a grove; and in the structure of the Grecian 
temple we may trace the characteristics of an edifice ori- 
ginally formed of trees hewed and pruned for the con- 
venience of transportation; for Greece was not a woody 
country, like those northern regions in which the Gothic 
architecture arose. In Egypt, where trees are still more 
rare than in Greece, where, indeed, there is nothing that 
can be properly cémpared to our idea of a tree, we find the 
character of the architecture partaking of the features of 
what must have been the early habitations of a people ne- 
cessitated, by their inarborous climate, to make their per= 
manent retreats, and the’sanctuaries of their gods, in the 
hollows and caverns of the earth. The architecture which. 
would arise among such a people we should expect to be 
dark, massy, and stupendous; and accordingly we find in 
that of Egypt, and of other countries which resemble it in 
circumstances, temples and labyrinths that rival in ex< 
tent and intricacy the grottos of nature, and pyramids 
shat emulate in magnitude and durability the ab 
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