No. CXCIV.

SUCH of our readers as take an interest in the topography of ancient Jerusalem, will be well pleased to recognise the name of Mr. Fergusson, whose speculations on the site of our Lord's sepulchre were lately noticed in our pages. In those speculations, Mr. Fergusson displayed considerable scholastic learning, and a very extended knowledge in architecture, joined to great boldness and originality of thought. But boldness in arguments of that kind, is not a merit; and Mr. Fergusson's book on the topography of the Temple, will be more valued for its architectural details than its historical inferences and suppositions. He has now assumed a more congenial task, and with better prospect of success in the work before us-a work, too, in which, if he succeed, even to a small extent, he will gain enduring fame and honour. And although, in our judgment, he has set about his undertaking in a way much too ambitious, and betrays in his collateral disquisitions an excessive vanity, we are indebted to him, so far as he has gone, for some new and highly valuable views on the connexions and affiliations of the different schools of architecture; and we have no doubt that when he shall have completed his exposition of the Eastern styles, in his promised second volume, not only the architect, but the philosophic historian and ethnologist will have to own themselves obliged by his labours.

The collateral matter which we have referred to, is as irrelevant as

any subject of human knowledge can be to another; being nothing less than a new digest and classification of the entire cyclopædia of the arts and sciences, begining with theology and the pure mathematics, and coming round, through (inter alia) music and gastronomy, to religion and theology, where the circle began. In this department we have abundant new divisions and terms of philosophy, not heretofore in use-technics, æsthetics (an unhappy word, the cloak of so much naked pretension, new-turned and lined by our author), phonetics, eu-phonetics, chromatics, eu-chromatics, anthropics, and what not. Mr. Fergusson conceives himself under a necessity of re-arranging all these, before he can properly approach his subject; and in the new distribution and classification which he makes of them, exhibits an exorbitant and obtrusive self-esteem, by no means calculated to conciliate the favour, or secure the confidence, of his readers.

He dwells with singular complacency on the obstacles which, it seems, he has had to surmount in the early pursuit of learning:

"In early life my mercantile pursuits kept me too close at the desk to have time for society, and having no taste for the ordinary amusements of my fellowlabourers, I sought my only distraction in reading and, as was to be expected, soon read my head into a chaos. Í struggled long and hard to classify the ill-digested mass of incoherent facts with which my brain was filled, but for a long time in vain; till this division into

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sciences and arts [viz., meaning by the former, a knowledge of all that nature does without man's intervention; by the latter, a knowledge of all those modifications that man works on nature's productions] broke upon me, and all became clear. It came upon me like a flash of lightning. From that hour I never had any difficulty, however various my readings might be. Every new fact found at once its appropriate pigeon-hole in my brain-nothing came amiss to me; and I am convinced that if I have two ideas more original, or more worth reading than those of my neighbour, I owe it to the happy inspiration of that hour."

Yet any one disposed to quarrel with our author's definitions would not, we apprehend, have much difficulty in showing them to be by no means absolute, although accurate enough for the rough rudiments of self-education. It must not be supposed, however, whatever conventional protestations custom demands on such occasions, that Mr. Fergusson alleges his early disadvantages with any apologetic view on the contrary, it rather seems by way of enhancing the merits of a success, admirable in any case, but in this, wonderful beyond precedent.

"Few men have, either from education, or the professional pursuits of their life, been less prepared for such a work as this. From boyhood I was destined to the desk. From school I passed to the counting-house; from that to an indigo factory-of all places in the world, perhaps, the one least suited for any knowledge of the fine arts; from this to become an acting and active partner in a large mercantile establishment, from the trammels of which, in spite of every endeavour, I have never been able to free myself; and during the time this work has been in hand, I have written, and, perhaps, also thought, more about the state of the money-market, indigo, sugar, silk, and such-like articles, than I have regarding architecture, painting, or sculpture.'

All this, and more in the same taste, had better been omitted; and in future editions of the work, which its proper merits justify us in expecting, we may possibly be spared both what is personal to the author, and what is impertinent to his subject.

His subject is architecture-his object, the elevation of his art, by every practicable method of proportion,

form, colouring, and expression, consistent with fitness. The aim is sufficiently lofty for the highest exercise of any one man's energies. In taking a survey of what has been already achieved by different nations, at various times, in their several modes of building and decoration, the whole field of history, chronology, and ethnography is open to the investigator. He is at liberty to range through a space of five thousand years in time, and over a surface co-extensive with

the habitable globe. But he will perform his task best, who makes fewest excursions into collateral topics; who indicates the origins and affiliations of architectural styles, by architectural, rather than philological remains, and who gives most new materials to the historian, with the least amount of aid from history. Supposing, however, that the survey of all that has been done were completed, and all the collateral aids of learning exhausted in classifying and analogising existing structures, it would remain to apply whatever general principles had been evolved in the investigation, to the further advancement of the art, and perhaps to the production of new forms of architecture, as proper to our own times and circumstances, as the Egyptian, the Greek, or the Gothic, were to their respective localities and epochs. In the ultimate prosecution of an undertaking of this nature, there would doubtless be room for speculations of a widely discursive kind; but, for the present, Mr. Fergusson professes to be engaged only in the preliminary survey, and of that survey, a half only is completed; and the generalisations as yet suggested are consequently imperfect, and give no ground for any suggestion of further advancement in the art. We protest, therefore, as we have already protested, against these ambitious beginnings which, even were they in commensurable elements, are so little likely to have corresponding conclusions in the end.

It is satisfactory, after having dis charged a duty of censure, to find room for an equivalent of commendation; and the agreeable task now remains to us of doing justice to a mind. of undoubted vigour and originality. We beg our reader will forget that we have had to expostulate against ex

travagances, and to reprove the foibles of an over-confident genius. If our author have succeeded, as we think he has, in setting some things, of great moment in his art, in a new and true light, he deserves, if not toleration, at least an amnesty for faults which, after all, are but the indiscreet expression of one element of intellectual vigour.

Among the novel views which Mr. Fergusson has opened to us, we assign the most important place to his exposition of the means of lighting interiors, and his reconcilement of the modes by which this was accomplished in Egyptian halls, in Greek temples, in Roman basilicas, and in Gothic churches. If he be right-and we have strong and independent reasons for believing that he is right-in his views on this subject, a great and perplexing discrepancy has been removed; the Greek genius is relieved of what has been always considered, save by those bound by architectural superstitions, as a reproach; and a new step has been taken towards the generalisation of architectural interiors.

We shall best, perhaps, make the necessary preliminary explanations, by describing the form and arrangement of the Roman basilica, as a species of middle type, from which the earlier and later designs may be deduced. Let the reader imagine a barn-shaped building, of lofty and narrow proportions, having a row of windows immediately under the eaves in the upper part, and a series of open arches on the level of the floor, in the lower part of each side wall. Add, at each side of this central structure, a wing of the same length, but of half the height, and cover in these lateral sheds by pent-house roofs, sloping upward to the under sills of the windows of the central building. The interior, so constructed, will thus be divided into a central apartment, or nave, communicating through open arches, with an aisle at each side, and lighted by windows opening above the roofs of these lateral apartments. These windows, so pierced in the upper story of the central building, are called the clerestory, and, in the basilica, are so proportioned as to leave intervals in the wall of sufficient solidity to support the roof, which in buildings of that kind re

quires no great strength in its supports, being framed of timber, and so bearing directly downward. In Gothic buildings, however, where the roof is arched and constructed of stone, the whole strength of the side wall, even undiminished by any apertures, would not suffice to resist the lateral thrust of the vault; and to give the necessary strength, external buttresses have to be added. These buttresses, however, if composed of solid masonry, would cross and intersect the aisles, cutting them up into separate divisions, which would destroy the effect of the interior. They are, therefore, carried across and over the aisles by light arches, springing from the external walls, and so assume the graceful and picturesque form of flying buttresses. By these, in fact, the pressure of the vault is resisted, so that the architect, in designing the clerestory, finds himself at liberty to cut away as much of the sidewall as he pleases; and instead of the limited opes of the clerestory of the basilica, may, if he will, and as in fact in many instances he has done, convert the whole upper part of the walls of the nave into a lantern of windows. And hence arises not only one great beauty of the Gothic interior, but a great part also of its aweinspiring effect. For, the flying buttresses which really prop the roof, being concealed from the spectator by the intervention of the lantern of stained glass, he seems to walk beneath a vault of stone, suspended by invisible means, at a height of a hundred feet above his head; the only apparent supports of which, the light pillars and slender piers between the windows of the clerestory, are plainly insufficient to bear so great a pressure. Whether the sense of insecurity, which undoubtedly enters to a considerable extent into the complex feeling of awe inspired by such an interior, be a legitimate emotion to bring in aid of religious sentiment, is a question not calling for discussion here; but the philosophic critic would probably give the preference to an interior which should excite emotions of religious awe to an equal degree, without the aid of any trick or artifice of construction. The basilican interior can hardly be said to do this; for, though all appears complete, secure, self-evident, and self-sustained, the sense of

awe is there subordinated to the perBut ception of beauty and fitness. the perfection we have spoken of unquestionably belongs to the great Egyptian interiors, where the emotion of sublimity is excited more powerfully than even in the noblest Gothic structure, and that quite independently of any concealed or unapparent arrangement of the parts, but resulting wholly, as in the minor degree it does in the basilican interior, from the grandeur of the masses and the harmony of the proportions.

Here possibly the reader may object, that in instituting this comparison between a basilican and Egyptian interior, and in comparing both with a Gothic one, we are no longer dealing in pari materiâ. But, in truth, the three styles of interiors are alike in all their principal features; for, the Egyptian hall consists, like the Gothic or basilican hall, of a central apartment or nave, with lateral apartments or aisles, rising to a lower elevation, to which access is given through openings between rows of columns, while the light is admitted through apertures in the upper walls of the central buildings-in fact through a series of clerestory windows, looking out over the lower level of the lateral roofs.

Mr. Fergusson's description of the great hypostyle hall at Karnac conveys a sufficiently distinct idea of such a structure, and of its effect on the beholder :

"In plan it is a perfectly regular rectangle of two squares, being about 170 east and west, and 340 north and south; it is again divided into four equal parts-one of which, in the centre, is higher than the side-aisles, its height being equal to its width; and its roof is raised above them one-third, so as to admit light to the hall through a range of clerestory windows, precisely as is done in Gothic cathedrals.

"On looking at the plan it will be observed that the central ranges of columns, which are sixty-four feet in height by thirty in circumference, do not stand in the same lines, north and south, as the side ranges, which, according to our modern rules of art, would, of course, be put down as a defect; but I cannot consider it as such, nor even suppose that it arose from the usual symmetriphobia so observable in all the buildings of Thebes, but that it really was done to heighten the effect;

for it will be observed that the whole light was admitted to the central compartment, either through the two great doors at either end of it, or by the clerestory; so that any one standing there was in the blaze of the light, but looking to the right or left, could not penetrate the apparently illimitable gloom of the wings; but would see column after column, each less distinct than the other, till at last they faded altogether from his sight. In like manner, any one standing in the shade of the sides, and looking towards the centre, would see these great columns standing in the full light, and half closing the vista; so that, except in one of the ten compartments into which it was divided, his eye could not look across the centre, or guess to what length the hall extended in that direction. But with all this artistic concealment of the limits of the hall, there must have been sufficient light, in that climate, to see to read in every part of it. I do not know any other building in the world in which this effect has been attempted, but I cannot conceive anything so well calculated to give apparent size to even small dimensions, or to add so much to those that were already considerable. .

"Perhaps the best mode of arriving at a just estimate of this building would be, by comparing it with some other similar well-known edifice, if such can be found.

"If we take, for instance, one of the bestknown of the cathedrals of that age-Cologne: its dimensions internally are 437 feet by 340 feet by 170 feet; the one covering 145 feet, while those of the hall are 58,300 feet, the other 57,800 feet. To the former, however, we must add the transepts, which cover nearly 10,000 feet more; so that the whole internal dimensions of the cathedral are larger than those of the hall; if, however, we add to the latter the propyla and side walls, we find that it covers 88,800 feet, while Cologne occupies only 74,500 feet, so that on the whole the ground plans may be considered as tolerably equal.

"In point of constructive skill, Cologne has infinitely the advantage over the other. At Karnac, for instance, in the central compartment, the proportion of the open space compared with the points of support is as one to five and a-half, and in the sides only as one to four nearly; while at Cologne the proportions are as one to sixty and one to forty. . . lam not prepared to say that the hall at Karnac does not run into the opposite extreme, and fail from excess of strength; but it was plain that power was the expression they aimed at, and durability their motive. They could easily, had they

chosen it, have made their pillars of less diameters, and even with the same architraves have got a wider intercolumniation, had they placed them on the wide-spreading capitals. But on the contrary, in the centre compartment, the abacus is a square within the diame. ter of the column, and in the side aisles it does not project one inch beyond the least dimensions of the pillar. By these means, it is true, the whole weight is thrown on the centre, and stability gained; but they were too good builders not to have effected this with greater space, had such been their wish. It was a work of fine art, not of use, they aimed at producing, and as such only we must judge it.”—pp. 215–218.

We regret that we cannot transfer, along with Mr. Fergusson's text, his engraved section of the building, a glance at which shows the positive identity of arrangements between these, the oldest structural interiors, and the Roman and Gothic halls of comparatively modern times.

But we are now to trace this similarity a step farther; and, therefore, postponing some observations on other Egyptian matters, which we shall revert to by-and-by, we proceed to show how Mr. Fergusson carries this idea of the clerestory, and with it all the pic turesqueness and sublimity of an aisled and naved interior, into the temples of the Greeks a great feat in historic architectural science, if he have been successful, and whether he have not succeeded let the candid reader now judge.

It may be necessary to premise, that the form which the Greek temple usually assumes, that, namely, of an oblong building, surrounded by a detached colonnade, was very early in use among the Egyptians, as, for example, the Mammeisi at Elephantine, ascribed to Amenophis III., and of which Mr. Fergusson gives a plan and elevation (p. 226) from the great French work on Egypt. But this colonnade, with the porticos at the ends, has hitherto been regarded as the principal part of the Greek temple; for the interior building, or cella, we have usually considered as being either wholly covered in by the roof, and so quite dark, unless artificially lighted, or else quite open to the sky, the roof, in this latter case, being confined to the porticos at the ends, and the colonnades at the sides. And this

second arrangement is what our classic antiquarians call hypothral, or the open-air style of temple. Now, every one who has reflected on the alleged construction of these hypethral cellas must have perceived the extraordinary ugliness of such a want in the middle of the roof of a building of that kind, disconnecting, as it does, the line of the ridge, and leaving the pediments standing up as separate pent-houses at either end, instead of presenting the appearance of terminations to a continuous roof, as all their members show they were designed to do. It appears scarcely credible that a people so jealous of beauty in architecture should have suffered their finest works to be dis-outlined, if we may invent the word to convey our meaning, by an expedient so destructive of every appearance of completeness and repose. We cannot help, therefore, rejecting the popular notion of the hypæthral cella, as applied to any Greek temple, of which we have the remains still existing. Assuming, then, that such of them as we are acquainted with were roofed, and roofed with an unbroken ridge-line, had they, on the other supposition, their cellas uniformly covered in and excluded from the light of day? Mr. Fergusson says not; and alleges that they had their cellas lighted, just as other great architectural interiors have been lighted for three thousand years, by a clerestory.

Here we must again regret our inability to transfer, with our author's argument, his engraved illustrations. With the aid of an engraved plan open before him, the most correct writer is liable to fall into inaccuracies of expression, and to rest content with vague and insufficient descriptions; for the text in such a case is too often regarded as merely ancillary to the drawing, and the writer, certain of being understood through the one method of expression, is little careful of completeness in the other. But a good writer, however he may avail himself of the collateral aid of drawings, will always take care that his text shall be sufficient by itself to convey its own meaning. Mr. Fergusson, although he has read much and thought more, and is in no way deficient in reliance on himself, is not a good writer. His text, unaccompanied by his plans, sections, and elevations, would not be