Architecture in the United States. 229 



trived which belong to no order whatever and which go far towards 

 destroying the whole character of the room. For the same reason, 

 as they informed me, the vault of the rotundo would have to be plain, 

 instead of being panelled as was originally designed. No comment 

 need be added to this. 



Public Monuments. 



Our remarks on other subjects of public architecture must be brief. 

 We will begin with public monuments. A monument, when designed 

 to be of small elevation, can take too great a variety of forms to be mi- 

 nutely examined here. It should always, however, be made solid 

 and substantial. A monument, as has been already said, implies in its 

 very name something that will last, and it must be a structure that has 

 the principles of permanency in itself, for posterity will seldom take 

 pleasure in the repair of such things : when therefore of perishable 

 form or materials, its character is incongruous with its professed de- 

 sign, and the effect is inevitably bad. For this reason, I could never 

 take much pleasure in the monument in the navy yard at Washington : 

 the battle monument, at Baltimore, is in better taste. There is an- 

 other monument near the latter city, belonging to a different and more 

 imposing order ; I mean those which are designed to be seen at a 

 distance, and in which height is therefore a principal object. These 

 are always either in the pillar or the obelisk form. The pillars are 

 numerous, and as they have great names among their architects, we 

 must speak of them with diffidence ; the reader must judge whether 

 my reasons for disliking them are valid or not. A column, whether 

 Grecian or Roman, was designed originally to support a heavy 

 weight ; and it was formed accordingly. All its parts, the base, the 

 shaft with the swell in its outline, the capital, even the mouldings are 

 formed to this, and when, after all this seeming preparation for 

 weight, nothing at all, or, at best, only an equestrian statue, is sup- 

 ported by it, the want of fitness produces a sensation by no means 

 agreeable. We take the idea of such monuments from the columns 

 of Trajan and Antoninus Pius at Rome, but there is one circumstance 

 about these columns which we omit in ours, and must almost from 

 necessity omit, but which entirely changes their character. They 

 are both covered with bas-reliefs. The shaft is no longer then a 

 simple support for a statue above ; it has lost its character of a shaft in 

 the true sense of that word, and. has become only a firm body to which 

 historical sculpture might be attached. The bas-reliefs which are ex- 



