1842.] 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL. 



217 



those who have actually beheld them ; because he who reads with 

 attention will carefully ponder upon, and reconsider the matter under 

 notice, whereas he who merely looks at things can afterwards give no 

 clear account of them ; so far, therefore, reading is more instructive 

 than seeing." Such is the remark of Cervantes in his Persiles and 

 Sigismunda, a work that may be said to be very celebrated, although 

 very little is known ; and it is one corroborated by my own experience 

 to a far greater degree than I could wish, for I have again and again 

 found it impossible to obtain any sort of information relative to build- 

 ings, from those who have actually seen them. When questioned as 

 to particulars, they tell you they did not notice this, they did not 

 think of looking for that; this they quite overlooked, that they quite 

 forgot to observe ; so that what with their overlooking and their for- 

 getting, you find there is no getting any thing out of them. According 

 to their own confession they can describe nothing, nor can thev re- 

 member any thing ; nevertheless, instead of taking any shame to 

 themselves for their ignorance, such people will give themselves airs 

 of superiority merely because they happen to have seen what you 

 have not, and have had opportunities by which thev have not in the 

 slightest degree protited. I once amused myself at tlie expense of 

 a traveller of that description, who was giving nie a long account of a 

 building he had visited. Having suffered him to go on without inter- 

 ruption, and letting him have it all his own way, I placed before him 

 a volume of engravings of the building in question, remarking they 

 must be exceedingly incorrect and untrustworthy, since they did not 

 at all tally with his description ; in fact they did not agree with it — 

 or rather liis description did not agree with them, in any one particular. 

 The consequence was, my gentleman looked very disagreeably as- 

 tonished at finding himself so completely contradicted by evidence 

 which he could not dispute. 



IV. Though I never heard of him before, I am in no danger of now 

 forgetting the name of the nonentity recorded by Nagler as "Phi- 

 lippus, an architect known to us by an inscription in Gruter's work, 

 which says 'Philippus architectus maxinius hie situs est.' " Truly tliere 

 is not much here either to forget or to remember — nothing, certainly, 

 worth knowing ; although it is an exceedingly great curiosity in its way, 

 as an article in a biographical dictionary of artists. It is ratlier too much 

 a la John Britton, who has foisted into his dictionary the names of 

 several such illustrious nobodies as carpenters, stone-masons, and 

 other mechanical geniuses. Surely there is little occasion for peopling 

 dictionaries of artistical biography with such mere ghosts and shadows 

 and sounds, as are Philippus and not a few others who flit before us 

 in Nagler's work, wliich is already so voluminous in itself, that, like 

 Falstatr, it requires no further stuffing out. In fact Nagler seems to 

 have pounced upon every name he could anywhere meet with, and has 

 accordingly caught and preserved some excessively small fry, people 

 whose names never appeared in print before, except in an exhibition 

 catalogue, or a newspaper paragraph. This is being over-minute and 

 scrupulous, more especially when we find that, notwithstanding such 

 minikin exactness, he has omitted some names of the first magnitude. 

 Will it be believed? — no, it is perfectly incredible — that, while he has 

 given a place in his dictionary to many living architects, and other 

 artists who are either comparatively or positively quite obscure, he 

 has actually omitted that of Charles Barry! This almost beats the 

 anecdote told by Krilov in one of his fables, of the man who, telling a 

 friend all the wonders he had just been examining in a museum of 

 natural history — the shells, moths, and insects there exhibited, was 

 asked by him what he thought of the elephant. "The elephant! — 

 why bless my soul ! I did not see the elephant at all!" After all, a 

 parallel instance to that in Nagler may be found in Wolff's account of 

 our English novelists, who, while he notices such bolstered-up medi- 

 ocrities as Lady Blessington and other namby-pamby scribblers, does 

 not bestow even a single word on Theodore Hook ! Utterly incredible, 

 yet positive fact. 



V. There is an immense deal of cant in the world besides religious 

 cant, and certainly no little of it infects both literature and art. I have 

 just at my elbow a book where .Shakspeare is eulogized in expressions 

 that may be termed blasphemous, the writer observing, as if reproach- 



ingly against the poet's contemporaries, that, notwithstanding his 

 unrivalled excellence, he did not obtain from them " a tithe of the 

 loving and reverent admiration we pay to the Creator of a world ". 

 This is rather too powerful for ordinary nerves, for when a man 

 writes in such a strain of any other human being, instead of honouring 

 the object of his adoration, he only disgraces himself, and compels us 

 out of mere charity to suppose that he must be quite insane. Much 

 as honest and sincere enthusiasm is to be commended in the literary 

 man and the artist, it has its limits, and if it oversteps them, it 

 becomes either raving madness or drivelling silliness. To hear some 

 people talk, one would really imagine that the Cartoons of Raphael 

 and the Elgin Marbles were the palladium of England— possessions far 

 exceeding in value all its colonies, and its " either Ind." They speak 

 of them is of things holy— as if their loss would be a loss to the 

 entire world, and as if civilization itself would be extinguished when- 

 ever they cease to exist. In like manner the enthusiastic admirers of 

 Grecian architecture are apt to speak of it as if the world would never 

 have known what architecture was, or have had anything worthy of bein" 

 so called, but for the pagan temples of Greece. Grecian architecture 

 is, I own, truly admirable, as far as it goes, but then it goes a very 

 little way indeed. Its resources are so exceedingly few— its alphabet 

 so exceedingly scanty— the combinations it admits of are so very, 

 very limited, that we may well be allowed to abate the demands 

 made upon our admiration in its behalf, as being rather too extrava- 

 gant. Well has it been observed by Goethe, that Grecian architecture 

 may be compared to a clever and intelligent child, very superior, if 

 considered only as a child — as such, perhaps a prodigv — nevertheless 

 not at all equal in capacity to a grown-up person of ordinary mental 

 abihty. What Grecian architecture would have ultimately become, 

 had it continued to thrive for ages without check or hindrance of any 

 kind, can now only be conjectured ; yet the probability is that it would 

 hardly have advanced at all beyond the point it actually attained. 

 Notwithstanding the poetical nimbus with which classical antiquity 

 has been adorned, the whole constitution of ancient society and civi- 

 lization was essentially barbarous, because essentially immoral : and 

 could it be atherwise, seeing that their very religion tended to 

 confound all sense of right and wrong, and tlieir deities were little 

 better than so many personifications of vice and baseness — profligate, 

 cowardly, lying knaves and rogues, cuckold-makers, and pimps. A 

 knowledge of the Greek dramatists may serve to recommend a man to 

 an English bishopric, because such has been the case before now ; but 

 the reverence paid to classical literature as an element of education 

 has, it may be feared, chiefly tended to keep up a moral taint, so that 

 in consequence of such influence in its higher spheres, " society itself 

 continues selfish, sensual, and belligerent." My pen is just such 

 another unmanageable beast as John Gilpin's steed, for it has run 

 away with me, till I have almost lost myself, and the reader lost his 

 patience altogether. 



ON THE SEPULCHRAL MONUMENTS OF SARDIS AND 

 MYCENiE. 



By Wu.uam Rathbone Greg, Esq. 



(From the Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of 

 Manchester.) 



* * It is not uninteresting to observe how generally the 

 monuments, erected in honour of the dead, have outlived those reared 

 for the use or the luxuries of the living. Thus, in the East, we con- 

 stantly meet with extensive cemeteries, standing alone in a deserted 

 region, where the cities which peopled them have been entirely swept 

 away, and where no human habitation can be found for many leagues. 

 On the plain of Troy, the Tumuli are the only remaining monuments 

 of a time celebrated beyond all others in the history of mankind ; — 

 the pyramids of Egypt have long survived the cities of the monarch 

 who erected them ; — at Mycena, the tombs of the Atridae may be seen 

 in their original integrity, though their palaces have left no vestige 



