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THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECTS JOURNAL. 



[Nov. 



Would that we could look to Sir Edward LyttoD Bulwer and some of the 

 other English visitors wl.o are now there, for their bringing borne with 

 them u little of the cordial love of architecture which there prevails. 



THE BRITISH MUSEUM. 

 No. IV. 



The collection of Greek and Roman domestic antiquities in what is 

 called the Bronze Room, is at present in confusion and unlabelled, so that 

 the examination is not very easy. 



Such a collection is particularly useful to the student, as it enables him 

 to get better ideas of the domestic life of the Greeks and Romans than he 

 can from books and artistic works, and to correct his ideas as to their slate 

 of social advancement. The progress of the fine arts and of the mechanic 

 arts is not necessarily correspondent ; and we may find a people producing 

 the most beautiful sculpture and painting who want common comforts, or 

 another whose painting is barbarous, but whose domestic arts are well 

 cultivated, as for instance in the case of the Chinese. While the Athenians 

 made a great stride in sculpture between the time of the Egina marbles 

 and of Phidias, it may be taken for granted that the progress of the useful 

 arts was not so great. The invention of a new machine would have been 

 ft needful to effect any great change, ^^'hile we look to the cultivation of 



the fine arts, as having an equivalent effect on the manners of the people 

 and in the advancement of artistic manufactures, it is evidently unequal to 

 the production of mechanic skill ; and we must be careful not to rely too 

 much upon artistic instruction, nor to push it too far. The existence in a 

 country of a general and refined taste is not inconsistent with the promo- 

 tion of mechanical pursuits, and is favourable to them, but we must not try 

 to give an artistic bias in education. At present our people get a good 

 mechanical training, which makes them the best workmen in the world, 

 and in trying to do more we must not lose this. 



One reason why the flourishing slate of the fine arts is no index of the 

 slate of the mechanical arts is, that the former are chiefiy handmaids to 

 wealth, and are employed either by a rich state, or by a few rich men, and 

 are little enjoyed by the people individually. While the Athenians were 

 raising the Parthenon and pouring out upon it all the riches of art, they 

 themselves were living in wretched huts, which had no share in the largess. 

 While the head men of Rome were filling their palaces with the greatest 

 works of old and new art, the people were as ill-lodged as when Romulus 

 and Remus began the town. The mechanical arts cannot, however, be 

 pursued without all getting a share in their works. Sawed timber and 

 wrought iron were luxuries among the ancients ; when towns were taken 

 by the Greeks, the planks and beams, the hinges and the nails, were car- 

 ried off as the worthiest part of the plunder, but as the stock got bigger 

 all classes were able to get a share. The husbandman willingly gave food 

 for a plough, an axe, a bolt, a kettle, or a pan ; but he would unwill- 

 ingly have given food for a carving or a painting, from which he could 

 have got nothing back. The fine arts became the servants of the rich, the 

 mechanical arts the servants of the poor. 



The fine arts are but one page in the history of civilization ; the Egyp- 

 tians could raise pyramids, the Russians have built a city of palaces, and 

 have filled them with the choicest works of the west ; hut as in the former 

 the people were wretched serfs, so they are iu the latter. The state of the 

 mechanical arts ami their employment by all classes is a far better index 

 of the condition of the people. Where the mechanical arts are degraded, 

 as among the Romans, a slave-class must exist, and the free-class must be 

 1 aupers, for idleness will do its work on all. In Ireland, if we have not 

 slavery in the name of the law, yet slavery and pauperism are the lot of 

 rhe people, and neglect of the mechanical arts may he reckoned among the 

 cuncurring causes. M here so many hundreds of thousands of beggars are 

 led by the pauper-people, carpenters, smiths, quarrymen, masons, brick- 

 makers, potters, bricklayers, and weavers might be as well fed. The Eng- 

 lish beggar-class are the hand-loom weavers, the lace makers, and straw 

 plaiters : those kept at the common charge break stones, grind bones, 

 pick oakum, make and mend the roads. In Ireland the beggar-class do 

 niiihing to keep up the common stock. 



So far as words go, freedom and the fine arts may be spoken of in wider 

 terms at Athens or at Corinth, than in London or in New York j but to 



judge we want something better than words. When we look at the handi. 

 work of the Egyptians, Greeks, or Romans, although we may acknowledge 

 iu some things very fair workmanship, yet on the whole we cannot but 

 feel that the people could not have had the same comfort, and therefore not 

 the same health and length of life as ourselves. The bearing upon the man 

 is the measure of civilization, words do not give it. There is the same air, 

 the same soil, and the same law iu Ireland, as in England ; and yet the 

 former is as well known for its beggary, as the latter for its wealth. 



The reader of Thucydides, of Livy, and of Tacitus, may find in a hinge 

 or a staple, a great commentary on the text of his author. He may see 

 bow painfully and how clumsily the commonest hardware was wrought, 

 and he may learn with what toil, with what time, and wiih what cost an 

 army or a fleet was fitted up, and how great was the wreck when it was 

 lost. It was shameful to lose a shield, because it took more to buy a shield 

 than a man; the warrior who lost his armour, lost, like a knight of the 

 middle ages, what it would take many rich fields to buy again. A part of 

 such spoil was hallowed in the temples, an offering as rich as gold and 

 silver. With us gold and brass are not linked together, for they are as 

 the top and the bottom wide apart ; with Homer, gold, bronze, silver and 

 tin rank as costly metals, for the workmanship of all being alike, the dis- 

 proportion of the price of the material was less. To burn the town was to 

 ruin the commonwealth which held it, for the mason's and carpenter's tools 

 were costly, the work was slow, and an unsheltered people could not raise 

 another town. Hence we find towns, once powerful and thickly peopled, 

 which never rose from the wreck which had been made of them ; and others 

 were only able to do so because the walls were readily patched up, or be- 

 cause the foe had gone away by sea. It is for such reason that we have 

 Cyclopean cities left to us as relics, which had been ruined in remote 

 ages. 



The best beginning for a sound knowledge of history and the progress of 

 civilization is to be laid down by carefully reading the works of Homer and 

 Hesiod ; not the smoothed down Louis Quatorze Iliad of Pope, but the 

 rough and rugged originals. From their works we get a knowledge of a 

 people, afterwards highly polished, who beginning as wild robbers were 

 then going through the first steps towards civilization. Not merely are the 

 manners drawn, but the houses, the fields, the tools. We see the king, the 

 warrior, the priest, the soothsayer, the husbandman, the brasssmith, the 

 potter, the housewife, the Phoenician trader, and the sea-rover ; but we see 

 moreo>er the rough tillage of the field, the early seeds of art, the beginning 

 of wealth. We have a lively painting of the dawn of civilization, such as 

 Cook saw it in Tahiti or Hawaii. In the British Museum we have the 

 tools of the Maori and the paper-cloth of the Tahitian ; but we have like. 

 wise such weapons and such ornaments as the Phoenician merchant sold to 

 the Homeric-Greeks. Those who well study the Iliad, acknowledge a 

 truthfulness in its drawings, which is the best seal of its antiquity, an anti- 

 quity not forged by Pisistratus, or in any later times. Those may who 

 like believe there never was a Homer, or that there were many, but that 

 the Iliad is a work of the time it holds forth to be, no well-thinking man 

 will deny. To be able to feel this it is not enough to read the text— it is 

 useless to read the Byzantine commentators or the scholastic commentators 

 of these later times : what we have to siudy is the remains of ancient art 

 and the relics of modern discovery, and not less those written records we 

 have of those who, in our own day, have been eye-witnesses of all the 

 phases of civilization. 



The lump of iron which Achilles gave as a prize in the death-games of 

 his friend, would be of little worth now, though the giver boasted of it as 

 enough to find all the iron a husbandman might want in a long life. In 

 the Museum we have spike nails, so highly thought of, that they are 

 stamped by the maker ; some with writing at a great length. A bronze 

 tripod vase or brass kettle given by the same hero, raised the mirth of Vol- 

 taire. Such vessels in the Museum show that with the rough tools of the 

 workmen they must have been made with great labour. A\ e must not look 

 through the spectacles of a Voltaire, neither is there any reason why we 

 should read with less interest what Homer has sung of king Agamem- 

 non or Achilles, than what Cook has written of king Terreobooorof Omai. 

 In the latter case we have the record not a century old, in the former a 

 quarter of a hundred centuries old; yet both are equally fresh, truthful, and 

 pleasing to a healthy mind. 



To understand the state of handicrafts among the Greeks and Romans, 

 is to understand the political and social condition of the middle ages, and 

 of those nations which in the present day are most behindhand. In the 

 overflowing of our material wealth we are oot ready to conceive bow much 



