24 Architecture in the United States. 



The Romans failed simply from a want of this discipline of taste. 

 If we were ignorant of the Roman style, and were acquainted only 

 with the fact, that they had the Grecian models before them on 

 which to form themselves, we should at first thought, expect them to 

 have pursued this art with the greatest success. Their first artists 

 were Greeks, and these it is true employed, most probably, the Cor- 

 inthian, the least pure order of the three. But the Romans were 

 fast becoming a refined nation, and it might have been expected that 

 architecture, as their knowledge of it was enlarged, would ascend 

 to the pure source, instead of drawin ^; from a corrupted stream. But 

 it was not so. In their high admiration of the Grecian art, they turn- 

 ed copyists, and to do this requires little effort of the mind. Ar- 

 chitecture was among them a fair and well proportioned body, but it 

 wanted life. 



" 'Tis Greece, but living Greece no more." 



Any one who passes from a contemplation of the Grecian to the 

 Roman monuments, will feel all this : the Romans seem to have felt 

 it also, and they resorted to ornament to supply or conceal the 

 deficiency. Sensible that power and majesty of expression were 

 wanting in their edifices, they began to amuse the attention with 

 what was finical and nice, and then ended with being absurd. There 

 is scarcely any species of form into which their temples did not pass,* 

 or any kind of ornament that may not be found on them, until at 

 last, the effort seems to have been solely to produce something new, 

 and something pretty, not something noble or grand. Their wealth 

 is to be considered an evil, as it furnished them with the means of 

 supporting this perverted taste. There are some exceptions to all 

 this, but they are few. The arch had no prototype in the architec- 

 ture of Greece, and its employment required the exercise of their 

 own faculties. The Pantheon and some of their triumphal arches, 

 shew how well they might have succeeded, had they only employed 

 with diligence the powers with which nature had provided them ; but 

 the impulse was too slight to carry them far, and they appear to have 

 soon passed into many puerilities, even in the arch. 



I have shewn how the Roman style fastened itself on the rest of 

 Europe, and how it has come down to modern times. Europe by 

 •degrees became Christianized, and here was another change in the 



* The reader is referred to Montfaucon for an exhibition of some of them. 



