more adaptation to our climate and peculiar circumstances. If we are obliged to make Egyptian buildings several stories high, we certainly are not obliged to confine the ornaments to the eternal scarabæus, a most unseemly emblem of a false mythology; nor in copying the lines of a Grecian temple for a Christian church, need we insist upon retaining the attributes of the heathen god. The ancients were never guilty of such mistakes. There was an intellectuality in their architecture, which always expressed the purpose of an edifice, not only in its general structure, but in the most minute decoration. They never built a temple of Plutus in the noble style which enshrined the Olympian Jove, or a shrine of the virgin Minerva in all the florid luxuriance which the Corinthian goddess loved so well. The vinewreaths of Bacchus were never seen on the gates of Diana, nor the peacock of Juno, where the doves and sparrows of Venus should have sported. But such incongruities (in remarking upon which I may seem hypercritical,) will soon be avoided. Nice imitation of faultless models is the best study for our infant architecture. After the mind is filled with pure ideas, and the taste refined by conversation with perfect forms, we shall be better prepared to combine, adapt and invent.

The Gothic order, that wonderful combination of solemn grandeur with luxuriant tracery, which

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astounds and enchants the American traveller in Europe, as he treads the aisles of time-worn cathedrals and crumbling cloisters, can never be established among us, at least not until we build merely for the sake of building. The gloom of the dark ages, in which it arose, has passed away. Our churches are now the abodes of clear truth, not of oppressive mystery; places of lowly and glad worship, not of long processions and pompous display. The Grecian styles suit our religion far better. The false poetry of “a dim religious light" does not agree with our faith in the God of love, who lifts upon his people the smile of a father's countenance. To one who has visited "Fair Melrose," "Fairy Roslin," the Seventh Henry's Chapel, the sublime Yorkminster, the ruins of ancient St. Joseph's at Glastonbury, or the magnificent cathedrals and bell towers on the continent, there is not a Gothic building in our land that does not look a puny and ridiculous abortion. Yet candour must admit, that our recent ecclesiastical buildings, after the Grecian models, promise a far better taste and propriety than the modern churches in our mother country. The high-backed pews; the inconvenient and meaningless recesses by which the church is tortured into the shape of the cross; the gloomy windows, granting little light, and less air; the tub-like pulpits, in which the preacher suffers like another Regulus, and the dizzy galleries, where the

people look like swallows on the house-top, have given place to arrangements, which enable all to see and hear and worship without doing penance.

It has been objected to us, that we use inferior materials, such as wood and stuccoed brick, instead of stone and marble; and it were well if we could afford to employ the more massive and durable; but certainly any thing is better than red brick and glaring freestone. It is not an improbable theory, that the pines of Thessaly, and the oaks of Dodona in Epirus, gave the Greeks their first ideas of tall columns and massive pillars, as the interbranching of the Druid groves taught the Gothic arch. The architrave, the triglyphs and metopæ, are memorials of the use of timber before the quarries of Pentelicus were opened. Why may we not hew our stately trees until we are able to copy them in laborious stone? Why may we not face our bricks with composition until we can do more than imitate the Romans, who faced them with marble? Colour and form are far more important than material. I am grateful to every citizen who relieves my eye by painting his house any hue but red, provided he do not choose a tawny yellow.*

Encourage yourselves, gentlemen, in all your departments, by this rapid growth of taste in architecture. It assures you that your countrymen have an

* Appendix (D.)

eye for proportion and purity, to which no art of design can long appeal in vain.

Our strong national enthusiasm in favour of every thing American, is another sure ground of encouragement. We have often carried this to a ridiculous excess; but it is an amiable and honourable characteristic that we long to stand well in the opinion of the world; nay, it is a philanthropic wish, which prompts us to recommend our free principles for universal adoption. It is, indeed, mortifying to read the extravagant praise lavished by kind-hearted critics upon every person and every thing that appears before the public. If Cicero were to arise from the dead, and pronounce an oration before us, he would be obliged to share epithets with every fledgeling lecturer, or electioneering declaimer. The anonymous filler up of the poet's corner in a daily newspaper, always sings like Homer, but

"Never like him nods."

A surgeon cannot set a broken finger, or a physician administer a bolus, but the grateful patient proclaims him a very Aristotle or Hippocrates.

"He beats the deathless Esculapius hollow,
And makes a starveling druggist of Apollo."

We have clever men undoubtedly. We have had, still have, and shall have great ones. But all the

Romans were not Fabii; and black swans are rare as ever, except in New Holland. Even American humanity must have some pigmies, if it be only for the sake of showing off our giants by the contrast.

Such injudicious encomium has an especially mischievous effect upon the young Artist. He is peculiarly sensitive of public opinion. I will not say that he belongs to

"A simple race, who waste their toil
For the vain tribute of a smile;"

but he feels that it is not enough to cry with the Pisan before his own works, "Bene! Bene!" without an echo to his exclamation. It is the hope of praise which cheers him in his lone and enthusiastic toil; and, if praise be withheld, his genius droops the wing and dies. It is most unkind to feed this generous appetite into morbid extravagance, as unkind as it was in that populace who smothered their patriot with the robes they heaped upon him for his honour. Chiselling a head, without a model, from a rough stone, does not make a Phidias or Thorwaldsen; painting one fair face, a Titian or a Guido; or copying a landscape, a Salvator or Poussin. Long study and learning, the abandonment of many a habit, and patient failure, were necessary to raise even the best masters to deserved eminence. Raffaelle learned from Massaccio. The Artist, even when he finds the flattering unction most sweet, knows that there should be some