ARCHITECTURE. 
63 
or marble, except to a trifling extent. To what end, pray, 
is so much stone hammered ? In Arcadia, when I was 
there, I did not see any hammering stone. Nations are 
possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the 
memory of themselves by the amount of hammered 
stone they leave. What if equal pains were taken to 
smooth and polish their manners ? One piece of good 
sense would be more memorable than a monument as 
high as the moon. I love better to see stones in place. 
The grandeur of Thebes was a vulgar grandeur. More 
sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an honest 
man’s field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wan¬ 
dered farther from the true end of life. The religion 
and civilization which are barbaric and heathenish build 
splendid temples; but what you might call Christianity 
does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes to¬ 
ward its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the 
Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so 
much as the fact that so many men could be found de¬ 
graded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb 
for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been 
wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then 
given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent 
some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for 
it. As for the religion and love of art of the builders, 
it is much the same all the world over, whether the 
building be an Egyptian temple or the United States 
Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring 
is vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and 
butter. Mr. Balcom, a promising young architect, de¬ 
signs it on the back of his Vitruvius, with hard pencil 
and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson & Sons, 
stonecutters. When the thirty centuries begin to look 
