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Florentine mansions were generally decorated with pedestals, pilasters, and cornices in great confusion; the parapets of the main building terminated with balustrades, and the square towers at the angles of the mansions terminated with pyramidal scroll-work, tripods, statues, and obelisk pinnacles. The entrance of the house was approached by a double flight of stone-steps, and with a balustrade on each side. The ceilings in the interior were formed by ribs, and tracery of various designs. Laneham says, "with great diamonds, rubys, and saphers, pointed-tabled rock, and round, garnished with their gold."* Some of these ornaments were executed in papier-maché, which material, though for years used in our theatres in dress, forming caps, helmets, &c., has again come into use in the carved decorations of our dwellings, such as flowers for ceilings, carved mouldings for doors, &c.t The skreen front of Northumberland-house, in London, built by Gerrard Christmas, is in this style; the oriel-window over the entrance-gateway, which is very beautiful, is that of James I.

REVIVAL OF ROMAN ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND.

The Florentine style prevailed in England but for a short time, when it was eclipsed by the revival of the ancient Roman architecture, which rose, phoenix like, from its ashes, and again took its lead, after having been banished above eleven centuries and a half. Its revival at this period to new energies is due to the talents and genius of Inigo Jones, who rose up to brighten the glory of England's architectural fame. He was the greatest architect England had since the revival of the arts, and may be considered the best and most perfect imitator of the Palladian style. Under the auspices of some noble patrons, he travelled through Italy in the early part of his life, where he studied the models of the ancients, and cultivated the style and principles of Alberti, Palladio, Vignolo, and Scammozzi, from whose works he formed that taste, which, in returning from Italy, he diffused, and caused to be generally adopted throughout his native country, until his death, which occurred in the year 1651, which it is said was occasioned through grief for the fate of his friend and patron, the unfortunate King Charles I.§ The edifices that serve to immortalize his name are those of Greenwich Hospital, White-Hall Banquetting-house, Pishobury, Hertfordshire; Gunnersbury, Middlesex, and Coleshill, Berkshire.||

Laneham's Hist.

+ Vassare says, that "Michael Angelo, who was a Florentine, gave to Menigello, a very indifferent painter, a model of a crucifix, beautifully executed, from which Menigello formed a mould, and made casts with thick paper and other composition, and sold them to the country people, who were Catholics; this shows that the art of working papier-maché was known in Italy before the middle of the sixteenth century."-(Duppa's Life of Michael Angelo.)

Inigo Jones was born near St. Paul's, in London, in the year 1572, was an apprentice to a joiner, by which he first acquired an accurate knowledge of the mechanical and subordinate part of his profession. His superior talents early attracted the notice of a munificent patron of the arts, Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel, at whose expense he explored Italy, and enriched his mind by the contemplation of its architectural treasures. Christian IV. invited him to Denmark, from whence he followed the train of the Danish monarch back to his native country, where, as soon as he arrived, was appointed architect to the queen of James I., a sister of the King of Denmark; and afterwards to King Charles I.

§ There is an amusing anecdote told of Inigo Jones, that shows him to have been witty in a moment when another would have been overcome by vexation. "When he was dismissed from the office of architect to the board of works, (on which occasion he wore, as was usual, a livery,) on the fall of his patron Charles I., he said, 'Well! then it is no longer In I go Jones, but out I go Jones.""-(Buck's Anecdotes.)

The inclosed quadrangle, or the more recent half H of Henry VIII., were now discontinued for a less diffused plan, except where the offices were connected by a quadrant, colonnade, or piazza, widely differing from the plan of the ancient mansion, originally borrowed from that of the monasteries. The elevation was now varied; the offices on each side were kept low, and the centre elevated to admit the stately portico, having the tympanum of its pediment filled with the full heraldic achievements, the badge of an earlier age: armorial bearings were also introduced, but in cartouche shields of Italian origin, over the doors and chimney-pieces. The large hall, the scene of former festivity, with its carved, timbered roof, and long table, was entirely excluded in this new arrangement; the present hall of entrance, and communication with the different suits of apartments, being of totally different appropriation, and deriving its origin from the Italian sola. The mullioned window, with its small quarries or panes of glass, was succeeded by the sash-frame, whence, as well as from the raised terrace environing the building, the beauties of the surrounding country might now be viewed.--(M.)

The Roman style continued to be adopted in England for some time after his death, and by a distant successor, Sir Christopher Wren, another luminary, who was the son of a clergyman in Wiltshire: he first developed his genius in the art, in 1663, and encouraged the cultivation of ancient classic taste, until his death in 1723. He possessed advantages over his predecessor, by the benefits he had received from a superior and college education: he was at once a perfect gentleman, a refined classic, and an astronomer; a great geometrician, and an eminent architect, even to boldness, no one understanding better than he did the principles of construction and stereometry. To attest the latter, it is only necessary to mention, though these buildings do not come under the head of domestic architecture,* St. Paul's Cathedral; St. Mary-le-bow, in Cheapside; St. Stephen's, Walbrook, near the Mansion-house, and St. Dunstan's, in the East, Thames-street, London, all masterpieces of his consummate skill.+

The above two names as architects will never fail to excite our admiration; but we may state, that of the same school, and near the same period, England is entitled to enrol the names of Sir John Vanburgh, and Gibbs the architect of St. Martin's Church, in London, among the men who have superlatively shone in the science of design, and the construction of Roman classic buildings. The former having been the architect of that national trophy, Blenheim-house, at Woodstock, in Oxfordshire; a splendid mansion, erected in the reign of Queen Anne, which will ever be admired as long as the nation retains a taste for the grand and the picturesque.

FLEMISH ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND.

When William, Prince of Orange, became king of England, A.D. 1689, we had a different style of architecture imported here from Holland, which prevailed among us, as well as their fashions of landscape and culinary gardening. The Flemish architecture, it may be observed, had been in this country before the time of William the Third's reign; but then it was confined chiefly to towns, and those in which the merchants from Amsterdam and Antwerp resided.§ In the town of Topsham,

* There is a house in Cheapside, which Sir Christopher Wren built for his own residence, well worthy observation. It is now inhabited by Mr. Tegg, the bookseller.-(B.)

+ That this great architect was gifted to a superior degree, and possessed the purest taste, the beautiful outline of the dome of St. Paul's, in conjunction with the campanille towers on the west front, will sufficiently convince us; but his too frequent employment of the carvers, Gibbins and Bird, and by their means loading the front with a profusion of petty ornaments, as festoons and pendants of flowers, vases, and masks, tended to impair and disfigure the chaste outline of the architecture, and to fatigue the eye where it ought only to dwell with pleasure.-(M.)

On the accession of William III., the nobility of this country obtained their ideas of pictorial beauty from Holland, and their country residences accorded with the taste of their prince. The façade of the mansion, built of brick of a fine red colour, was usually accompanied with an equal distribution of stone, sometimes without uniformity or regularity of design; the roof, of great height, admitted two tiers of dormer-windows, like the stadtholder's house at Amsterdam, and rose from a heavy projecting cornice, which occupied the situation of the balustrade. Dalkeith-house, in North Britain, a noble architectural specimen of this period, was erected after the model of a palace of the Prince of Orange, at Loo, in Guelderland. Those mansions were then tastelessly surrounded by a space levelled to a dead flat, and divided by canals; the slightest irregularity of ground was converted into a terrace, ascended by stone steps; broad gravel-walks were distinguished by ranges of trees, of impenetrable hedges of holly and of yew, with a high wall, bounded by the landscape.— (M.)

§ There had been discontents among the manufacturers in Flanders, in 1331, during the reign of Edward III., who took advantage of this to invite them as settlers in his own dominions.-(Rymer's Fœd. tom. iv. p. 491.) Fuller draws a quaint picture of the inducements thus held out to the Flemings. "Here they should feed on fat beef and mutton, till nothing but their fullness should stuff their stomachs; their beds should be good and their bed-fellows better, seeing the chiefest yeomen in England would not disdain to marry their daughters unto them, and such the English beauties that the most envious foreigners could not but commend."-(Fuller's History.) During the reign of James I., 1585, Antwerp was captured and sacked by the Spaniards; the Flemish merchants then came over and settled in this country in abundance, and partly because England was then ignorant of most manufactures; from this time our manufactures may be said to date their commencement. (Anderson's Commerce.) By these men, and on their various tastes, was formed that grotesque style of carved household-furniture which is at this time again so highly esteemed, and sought to be revived.—(H.)

a sea-port near Exeter, in Devonshire, there are still to be seen many houses on the strand in the Flemish style; the chief characteristics of which are the step gables and square clustered chimneys, separated by apertures between each, and built with small yellow Dutch bricks, known as clinkers. Several houses may also be seen in the paintings and prints of the Dutch masters, as Teniers, Hobbima, and Wovermans. Sir Peter Paul Rubens's château at Antwerp, in which place he was born, is in this style, and a good specimen.*

Glamis Castle in Scotland, the ancient seat of the Thane Macbeth, on which Shakspeare founded one of his most popular tragedies, is a fine specimen of Flemish architecture. It has the step gables, and on the angles at the top of the building, round, pendent, conical pinnacles-such as we find in most of the Dutch country-houses, and in the cities of Antwerp and Amsterdam, and also in those of the Lombard architecture. The best modern country-house in this style of architecture, is that of Lifton-park, near Tavistock, in Devonshire, the residence of J. Rendall, Esq., M.P. Abbotsford, in Scotland, the seat of the late Sir Walter Scott, the celebrated novelist, contains a mixture of this style.

GRECIAN ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND.

In the reign of George III., Messrs. Stuart and Revett, who had visited Greece to inspect the works of that classic people, on their return home published those monuments of taste which they met with at Athens, containing all their details, with the dimensions of the parts, and thus produced a work of attraction for our architects. But England was soon after this time too much engaged in a war with France to attend to the improvements of our domestic architecture, until the reign of George IV., (which we may fairly say was the Augustan age in England,) when architecture burst forth with a splendour unequalled in this country, both in our public and private buildings. Old and dilapidated houses in the metropolis were destroyed, and new streets formed; the Regent's and St. James's Parks were laid out, and splendid buildings began to be erected around them, which at once called forth the talents and tastes of our architects to new designs. The Grecian architecture, now combined with the Roman, was considered the most suitable, and thus became generally adopted throughout London, in the suburban villas, and in the distant environs. This style is too well known to need description, to those who have seen those noble and majestic columnar piles which now grace the fronts of our theatres, institutions, club-houses, and other public buildings. We shall therefore only observe, that of those architects who have peculiarly distinguished themselves in this style, we may name, without partiality, the late William Wilkins, Sir Robert Smirke, Mr. Cockerell, Mr. Inwood, and Decimus Burton. But this progress in Grecian architecture has been entirely owing to the discovery of the calcareous cement Roman Puteolanum, or Pozzolanum,—so called from Puteoli (the modern Pozzuoli) near Naples, where it was first used,-oil mastic, and various artificial stones, without which the expense of erecting these designs would have been too great. As examples of Grecian taste in the metropolis, we may name first, though not coming under the denomination of domestic architecture, St. Pancras New Church, then the London University, near the New-road, the new National Gallery, Exeter Hall, Covent-garden Theatre, the new Post-office, and the entrance to Hyde Park.

SUMMARY OBSERVATIONS.

During the reign of George III., it was made a subject of complaint among classic travellers, who had visited Rome and Greece, that our palaces and municipal buildings were wretched structures, and that classical architecture had been greatly neglected in our metropolis. I shall quote one for our * See a painting of it in the British Gallery, by himself. And further, P. Vingboon's Flemish Architecture, anno 1638.

K

purpose that will suffice:-"I feel," says Eustace, (in his Classical Tour,) "some regret at being obliged to acknowledge that the metropolis of the British empire, though the first city in Europe, and I suppose in the world, for neatness, convenience, and cleanliness, is yet inferior in architectural embellishments to most capitals. This defect, without doubt, is owing in a great degree to the nature of the materials of which it is formed, as brick is ill calculated to receive the graceful forms of an Ionic volute or a Corinthian acanthus; while the dampness of the climate is not so good for stucco, and which seems to preclude the possibility of applying it to the external parts with permanent advantage, as at Pompeia. But some blame may justly be attributed to our architects, who have neglected the models of antiquity for spurious ideas of their own, and in edifices where no expense has been spared, have displayed splendid instances of tasteless contrivance and grotesque ingenuity. But it is to be hoped that the taste and industry of the British nation will ere long triumph over this double obstacle, inspire artists with genius, teach even bricks to imitate marble, and give to the seat of Government, and capital of so mighty an empire, a becoming share of beauty and magnificence. Augustus found Rome of brick, and in his last moments boasted that he had left it of marble; may not London hope at length to see its Augustus?"

We shall now present a different picture in the next reign, that of George IV., showing that those hopes have at last been realized. "I went," says another writer, Mr. Rush, "to London again on a short visit in 1829. An interval of but four years had elapsed, yet I was amazed at the increase of London. The Regent's Park, which, when I first knew the west-end of the town, disclosed nothing but lawns and fields, was now a city; you saw long rows of lofty buildings in the outward aspect magnificent. On the whole space was set down a population of probably not less than fifty or sixty thousand souls. Another city, hardly smaller, seemed to have sprung up in the neighbourhood of St. Pancras Church and the London University. Belgrave-square, in an opposite region, broke upon me with like surprise. The road from Westminster-bridge to Greenwich, exhibited for several miles compact ranges of new houses. Finchley-common, desolate in 1819, was covered with neat cottages, and indeed villages: in whatever direction I went, indications were similar. I say nothing of Carlton-terrace, for Carlton-house was gone, or of the street of two miles from that point to Park-crescent, surpassing any other in London, or any that I saw in Europe. To make room for this new and spacious street (which contains various styles of architecture), old ones had been pulled down, of which no vestige remained; I could scarcely, but for the evidence of the senses, have believed it all."* And now, in 1840, we may further notice the magnificent houses along the Strand, King William-street, running from the Monument to Finsbury-square, and splendid houses in the Bayswater-road; but when we behold the more magnificent Italian columnar edifices on the east side of the Regent's-park, and the crescent on the west, where the houses are crowned with octagonal domes, we stand astonished with admiration. The historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remarks, that the description composed in the Theodosian age of the many stately mansions in Rome, might almost excuse the exaggeration of the poet, that Rome contained a multitude of palaces, and that each palace was equal to a city. Is the British metropolis advancing to this destiny?

ASSYRIAN ARCHITECTURE.

In our enquiry into the domestic architecture in Asia, we find the Assyrians were the first people

* Rush's Residence at the Court of London. The Regent's and St. James's Parks, and the streets communicating with each, were laid out by the late John Nash, architect to Buckingham Palace; a man possessing great taste for the grand and the picturesque.-(B.)

that formed themselves into a monarchy, therefore the first in order of renown.* This empire being founded by Nimrod, as soon as men had sufficiently multiplied, and were forming themselves into tribes after the Deluge, he collected them together on the plains of Chaldæa, where he built the city of Babel, and thus entirely changed the political existence of those who had been living a wandering and pastoral life. The epithet 'mighty hunter' applied to this prince in Scripture, (Gen. xv. 9.) seems to mean no more, than that this chief, like most of the heroes of glorified antiquity, addicted himself to the hunting of wild beasts, and thus acquired qualities adapted to a warfare with men, his success in which was ensured by the number of bold and exercised men who had associated with him in his active occupation. The city of Babel, afterwards known as Babylon, which Nimrod built, was of vast extent, and surrounded by a high and thick wall, on which were erected watch-towers. As to the houses in this city, we are informed that there was an interval between them to prevent general conflagration, and that they occupied only a portion of the city, namely, ninety stadia.

Of the houses no remains can now be found, but Dionysius of Halicarnassus informs us that the earliest of them were towers; and Sir William Drummond thinks, that a Babylonish house on this plan was probably like a Chaldaic hieroglyph.§ They are square, says he, of two stories high, with a door in the centre, and three windows in the floor above, resembling the tower-houses at Thebes. At Babylon, Mr. Buckingham, when there, was of opinion that the houses were flatroofed, and covered with reed, bitumen, and brick, examples of which he met with in the ruins of that city, and which were so cemented together that he found it impossible to separate them.¶

*All countries and ages of the world, ultimately experienced the advantage of this one important truth, that society is the basis of all knowledge, the spring and source of arts and sciences which have been promulgated, improved, and handed down to us by succeeding ages. Egypt and Greece had their public schools, which taught the true principles of philosophy: Pythagoras, Plato and others laid their foundations, and Seneca, Cicero, and the Roman philosophers built their studies on them; and later times have produced innumerable instances of the success and progress of learning in the seminaries of literature. The ants form a republic and the bees a kingly government, it is natural that men should associate together; they were also better protected.-(M.)

+ During the first ages after the Flood, (2348 B.c.) says Sir William Drummond, men must have lived in tents, as did the antediluvian patriarchs, and been chiefly dependent for subsistence on the produce of the chase, on the flocks and herds. (Sir William Drummond's Origins.) But that many of the Asiatics lived in caves, we have both the authority of Scripture and the testimony of travellers to prove. In this manner lived the Edomites,-"O thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rocks." (Jeremiah, xlix. 16.) Lot went up out of Zoar, one of the cities of the plain, (now the Dead Sea,) and dwelt in a cave in the mountains, as the angels had directed him. (Genesis, xix. 30.) The cities of the plain were Sodom, Gomorrah, and Zoar; and we may infer that, as no fragments can now be found of them, they were but small towns built with brick or mud, without any pillars, or, if there were any, probably of wood; therefore a few days' submersion would convert them into heaps of rubbish, and dissolve them in the waters, not to speak of the previous overthrow and burning which it experienced. (See Genesis, xix.) It is still a common practice in the East for the inhabitants of towns and villages to hasten for safety to the mountains in times of alarm and danger, or at least to send their valuable property away. The moveables of the Asiatics in towns and villages are astonishingly few, compared with those which the refinements of European life render necessary. A few carpets, kettles, and dishes of tinned-copper comprise the bulk of their property, which can speedily be packed up, and sent away on the back of camels or mules, with the women and children mounted on the baggage. In this way a large village or town is in a few hours completely stripped, and the inhabitants, with everything belonging to them, can place themselves in safety in the mountains.-(Tavernier's Travels.)

Milton says of Nimrod," Hunting, and men not beasts shall be his game. (Paradise Lost, book xii. line 30.) The principal towns of Nimrod's kingdom were Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, all situated in the land of Shinar,or Singar. -(Gen. x. 10.)

§ Origins, ii. 343.

|| At Jerusalem, in Palestine, in the time of David, it is well understood that the houses were flat-roofed, for we are told, that he arose from off his bed and walked upon the roof, from whence he saw Bathsheba. (2 Sam. xi. 2, 3.) The roofs being flat, a house situated on an elevated spot, as the regal palaces in the East were, a person was enabled from their summits to overlook those around it. These roofs had parapets, and were their summer bed-rooms, with no other canopy but the heavens. But among the king's subjects, prudent persons were cautious, who inhabited elevated situations, of inspecting the proceedings of their neighbours; for in many places in the East, a man would be thought perfectly justified in shooting a too prying person through the head, a thing which does sometimes happen. Mr. Buckingham, while at Bagdad, informs us, that at daybreak (the time at which the inhabitants of the East rise) he saw from his sleeping-room, on the roof of the house, several people on those houses around him lying in bed, and others up and dressing, and among those were females; but he was cautious not to let it be observed.-(Travels in Mesopotamia.)

Buckingham's Travels in Mesopotamia.

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