CHAPTER VI.

APPLICATION OF THE SAME PRINCIPLES TO COMPRESSILEBUILDING, BY THE MEDIAEVAL ARCHITECTS.

“ On the whole, it seems to me that there is but one presiding principle,which regulates and gives stability to every art. The works, whether ofpoets, painters, moralists, or historians, which are built upon general na-ture, live for ever; while those which depend for their existence on parti-cular customs and habits, a partial view of nature, or the fluctuation offashion, can only be coeval with that which first raised them fromobscurity.”— Reynolds, Discourse iv.

The Greek architecture, having in itself few elements ofchange or corruption, survived in tolerable purity for a longerperiod than any other known system, and even in its latestworks (few of which, however, were durable enough to remainto us) it escaped one fault, that seems to have had a greatshare in breaking up all other styles, (the Egyptian, Roman,Hindoo, Arabian, and Gothic, for instance,) viz. the use, asornaments, of miniature models of the principal features ;—the puerility that led, in Egypt , to making a capital like alittle house or temple; at Rome and Baalbec , to enclosing aniche with small columns and a pediment; in Gothic England ,to applying buttressets and pinnaclets without number ; inIndia , to a similar crowd of modelled colonnades, verandahs,and domes; and in Moslem lands, to shelves and cupboardslike cloisters, and to that multiplication of little sham vaultingsthat has obtained the name of the stalactite ceiling ;—the ob-ject of all being to get false magnitude by diminishing the