Of the architecture of Palestine, which appears to have been chiefly that of the Phoenicians, we shall have scarcely occasion to treat, as the temple and palaces built by Solomon are so amply described in the first book of Kings and the seventh chapter, as well as in the Chronicles; but of the palace of Lebanon we may subjoin the following note as interesting.*

Although Grecian architecture is now the second in renown after that of the Egyptians, yet Assyria, as we have before observed, was a powerful empire under Nimrod; and Tyre and Sidon were opulent cities, abounding in manufactories, where the Phoenicians carried on an extensive commerce, while

tended from one tower to the other by the publicans to secure the gathering of customs, all entrance and going out of ships by night may be hindered, and no man can possibly convey away anything taken out of the ships; nor do I think any haven in the world is to be found like unto this. The island on which the city stood was surrounded with a wall one hundred and fifty feet high, and of proportional thickness, constructed with immense stones strongly cemented together." (Arrian.) The houses in the time of Strabo were here of three and four stories high, and built with splendour and magnificence, and inhabited by merchants whose wealth rivalled the opulence of kings, and whose fleets, prior to the celebrity of the Greeks and Romans, had braved the dangers of the ocean, and sailed to the four quarters of the globe. Let us contemplate these enterprises as completed by the efforts of a single city, which possibly did not possess a territory of twenty miles in circumference, which resisted a siege of thirteen years against all the power of the Babylonians, and another of eight months against Alexander the Great, in the full career of his victories, and then judge whether a commercial spirit debases the nature of man, or unfits him for the exertion of determined valour; and whether any single city recorded in history is worthy to be compared with Tyre.-(Dr. Vincent's Commerce, Navigation and the Arts, vol. ii. p. 624–5.)

But for exulting over Jerusalem in its calamity, the downfall of Tyre was predicted. "Son of man, because that Tyrus hath said against Jerusalem, Aha, she is broken that was the gates of the people: she is turned unto me: I shall be replenished, now she is laid waste. Therefore thus saith the Lord God; behold, I am against thee, O Tyrus, and will cause many nations to come up against thee, as the sea causeth his waves to come up. And they shall destroy the walls of Tyrus, and break down her towers: I will also scrape her dust from her, and make her like the top of a rock. It shall be a place for the spreading of nets in the midst of the sea: for I have spoken it, saith the Lord God; and it shall become a spoil to the nations." (Ezekiel, xxvi.) When the time for its destruction arrived, Alexander, before whom all the world quailed, came with his army and laid siege to it. He spent eight months before Tyre, and at last was compelled to a great undertaking, that of constructing an embankment or causeway from the main-land to the island on which the city stood, which he accomplished, giving his troops and engines full access to the walls. The Tyrians still however made a valiant defence, which, with the delay they had occasioned, so provoked the conqueror, after he captured the city, that with a cruelty, not unusual with him, and which has left a great stain upon his character, he crucified two thousand of the inhabitants, and sold thirty thousand for slaves; eight thousand had been slain in the storming and capture of the city. The town itself he set on fire. (Q. Curt. iii. 2, 3. Arrian, ii. 18.)

Maundrell, who had travelled through the Holy Land, saw it, and thus describes it in its state of desolation: "The city of Tyre, standing in the sea upon the peninsula, promises, at a distance, something very magnificent; but when you come to it you see no similitude of that glory for which it was renowned in ancient times, and which the prophet Ezekiel so fully describes. On this rock where the city once stood, you see nothing now but a mere Babel of broken walls, pillars, vaults, &c., there being not so much as one of its ancient houses entire. Its present inhabitants are only a few poor wretches, harbouring themselves in the vaults, and subsisting chiefly upon fishing, who seem to be preserved in this place by Divine Providence, as a visible argument how God has fulfilled his word concerning Tyre, that it should be as the top of a rock, a place only for fishers to dry their nets."

* The house of the forest of Lebanon. (1 Kings, vii. 2.) The idea to be formed of this palace is, probably, that the house of the forest of Lebanon wherein the king dwelt, and the house of Pharaoh's daughter, were only different parts of the same large building, agreeably to the plan of oriental palaces. According to this view, the palace stood in the centre of a large oblong square, against the enclosing walls of which were built the necessary offices and apartments of the officers of the court. The palace itself was, on the whole, an oblong building, consisting of two courts, one on each side of a great central oblong hall and portico. This central hall, one hundred cubits long by fifty broad, was perhaps, in a more particular sense, the house of the forest of Lebanon, on account of the forty-five cedar pillars which supported its ceiling of cedar. This would seem to have been the grand royal hall of the palace. In front of this hall was the grand porch of judgment, which is obviously analogous to the gate of judgment of the Alhambra at Granada. This central porch and great hall seem to have been devoted to public affairs: on the right is the king's house, being a square court surrounded on all sides by a colonnade in front of the buildings which comprise the house, except on the side next the wall, where there are no buildings but only the colonnade. On the other side of the great hall was a nearly similar house for Pharaoh's daughter, or, in other words, the harem, a house for that princess and her female establishment, being in strict accordance with existing usages, under which the females, both in royal and private establishments, occupy a building quite distinct from that of the men. In reality, this distinction of a mansion into three parts, one for the public, a second for the male part of the family, and a third for the females, still prevails in the East.-(Bellamy.)

the Arcadian Greeks were ignorant of the most obvious and necessary arts, and are said to have been feeding upon acorns.*

It was a received opinion among the best-informed and most judicious Greek writers, that Greece was originally held by barbarians, a term appropriated in the flourishing ages of that nation, as a definition for all people who were not Greeks. Among the uncertain traditions of the various hordes, who, in early times, overran the country, the Pelasgian name is eminent, which may be traced in the East into Asia; so some think the Pelasgians were the ancestors of the Greeks. Hunting was their resource for a livelihood, and arms their first necessaries; they spread far, had few neighbours, and with those few little intercourse. Such people were, therefore, inevitably barbarians; but they would soon increase, and at last form themselves into colonies, and being visited by the Phonician navigators, perhaps soon after its first population—they being at no great distance from the sea, the whole participated in the means of civilization.†

This classic country-called by the ancient inhabitants Hellas, by the Romans Græcia, and thence by us Greece, as immortalized in the annals of mankind-is of small extent, being scarcely half so large as England, and not equal to a fourth part of France and Spain. But it had natural peculiarities which influenced not a little both the manners and the political institutions of the inhabitants. Cecrops, it is generally allowed, was the founder and the first monarch of Athens, the capital of Greece, B.C. 1556. He was an Egyptian by birth, and landed at the first invasion of Attica, with a number of adventurous followers.

According to every account he found the natives a wild, ignorant people; a circumstance far from adverse to his purpose of forming a settlement.§ The country also, though not offering the most alluring prospect to a more refined and penetrating eye, was far from uninviting. On the verge of a plain, watered by ten small streams, a haven presented itself, commodious enough for the vessels of the time. Between the streams, near their junction about three miles from the shore, a rock, rising nearly perpendicular on all sides, offered every advantage for a fortified port. This union of circumstances was precisely what the early Greeks most desired for the situation of a city.|| Such was that of Argos with its citadel Larissa and part of Nauplia. Corinth, with the Acrocorinthus and

Some confining this idea to the acorn of the English oak, have expressed a doubt if it were a food on which men could exist; but it is to be remembered that acorns-glandes, Báλavo-have been employed in the several languages as general terms, denoting all the various fruits of the acorn kind. That the acorn of the common oak-tree in Greece would afford a wholesome nourishment for man, and that even in civilized times it was not a very favourite food, we may learn from a passage in Plato's Republic, when Socrates, specifying the diet to which he would confine his citizens, proposed to allow them myrtle-berries and oak-acorns; to which Glaneon replies, "If you were establishing a colony of swine, what other food would you give them?" (Plat. de Repub. i. 2, p. 372, t. 2, ed. Serran.) The Cossæans, a free people in Mesopotamia, who have inhabited caves in the mountains time out of mind, are well known to feed upon acorns and salted flesh of wild beast.-(Arrian's Expedition of Alexander, b. vii.) In Italy, Sicily, Corsic, &c., the chestnut is still used as food by the peasantry, and is very wholesome when made into bread. The acorn and chestnut are here probably confounded.

+ At Mylan, in the Grecian Archipelago, near Smyrna, there is a Grecian primitive colony settled near the sea-coast, whose houses along the shore are cut into the sandstone rock; they consist but of one room, and without a chimney. Along the brow of the cliff there are houses built for the better sort of people, but none of which exceed one story in height.—(H.) Hill's Essays.

§ The hazard to which unfortified and solitary dwellings were exposed from pirates and freebooters, naturally drove the more peaceable of mankind to assemble in towns for mutual security. To erect lofty walls around those towns for defence was then an obvious invention, and required little more than labour for the execution.—(Thucydides, i. 1. c. 10.)

|| In ancient Greece every metropolis possessed its citadel and its plain, the citadel as a place of refuge during war, the plain as a source of agriculture in peace; therefore the appearance caused by a plain, and surrounded by mountains, or having lofty rocks in its centre or sides, is at this day the general indication of ruins, which denote the locality of some ancient capital. Many of these plains border the sea, and seem to have been formed by the retiring of its waters; cities so situated were the most ancient: Argos, Sicyon, Athens, and Corinth are of the number. The vicinity of fertile plains to the coast offered settlements to the earliest colonies before the interior of the country became known. As population increased, and the first settlers were driven inward by new adventurers, inland cities were established, but all of them possessing their respective plains.—(Mitford's Hist. of Greece.)

part of Lechæum, and many other mountains--but not of that formidable height common through Greece-at some distance surrounded the plain, which, though not of the best fertility, appeared not unsusceptible of cultivation. Cecrops occupied the rock, but how far by force or how far by persuasion we are not informed, but it is certain that he subsequently extended his dominion over the whole tract called Attica.

Having thus taken possession, he divided his territory into twelve districts, with a principal town, or rather perhaps village in each, where he caused justice to be administered according to some salutary laws which he enacted, and taught his subjects a more regular and effective mode of defence against the incursions of the Boeotians, their only neighbours, from which even their poverty did not exempt them. The fortress, which now became his residence, was from his own name called Cecropia, whom the Greeks worshipped as a divinity by the name Athenaia, and the Latins by that of Minerva ; while many of the natives, induced by the near neighbourhood of the fort, and expecting security both from the citadel and from its tutelary deity, erected their habitations around the foot of the rocks.+

Into their state of domestic architecture, neither the poems of Homer nor any collateral source afford much insight. Both in the Iliad and the Odyssey, indeed, palaces are described; but in a manner extremely general as well as indefinite. These palaces, which appear to answer all purposes for public edifices, are described as very capacious, containing numerous apartments very rich in doors of ivory and gold, and with posts of silver; but not the slightest expression occurs indicative of any regular order of architecture, ornament, or design. Magnificence or lavish profusion of splendour is everywhere confounded with beauty and grace, and regular art. During the Homeric age, it is plain that the orders of architecture were yet unknown, or at least not adjusted in such proportions as we now have them in the Grecian temples. In most of the states of Greece the first houses were small, and destitute of ornament; and at Sparta they were uncommonly plain. During the prevalence of the institutions of Lycurgus, the Spartans were obliged by law to form the inner part of their habitations of the coarsest materials: they worked without a plane; the doors were fashioned by the saw, and the ceiling alone by the axe;§ not that the legislator intended to abolish altogether the science of architecture; he merely wished to restrict it to temples and public buildings as the Egyptians had before done in Egypt. The flat roofs of the early private dwellings peculiarly distinguished them here from the public edifices;|| but in Arcadia, nothing distinguished the houses of the nobles from others. At a late period, however, when they began to improve in their domestic architecture, they were conspicuous only from their contrast with those magnificent temples erected during the administration of Pericles; but ultimately they were rendered very splendid by a great variety of em

* Boeotia was one of the largest establishments of Greece, founded by Cadmus, the grandson of Agenor, king of Tyre, five hundred and sixty-two years after the walls of Babylon were built, and three hundred years before the Trojan war. He brought architecture into Greece from the Phoenicians, and there built Thebes, in 1124 B.C., so called after the famous city of Thebes in Egypt, where he had spent many years of his life.-(History of Greece.)

+ Before the age of Pericles, the houses, which had gradually spread along the plain, formed a circuit of more than five miles. As Athens contained only from forty to fifty thousand inhabitants, this extent was more than sufficient for their accommodation; but many of the houses were surrounded with gardens and plantations, which were necessary in so warm a climate, and thus rose early a considerable town, which from the name of the goddess was called Athenia, or, as we after the French authorities have corrupted it, Athens.—(Hill's Essays.)

The city of Sparta, like many of the oldest of the Grecian towns, was composed of five hamlets, near each other, but not adjoining, and this city had no wall; the city was the residence of the nobles, the country of the commons.-(Müller's Dorians.)

§ Plutarch, Lycurg, 13 de Eu. Cam. ii. p. 2. Reg. Apophth. p. 125. Lac. Apophth. p. 222. Quæ St Rom. 872, 363. Proclus ad Heriod. op. et Di. 421.

Theophrast. 18, 330.

bellishments. Even the kings of Greece, in Homer's time, lived not only in spacious houses of stone, which the poet calls polished stone, but also richly ornamented houses, the walls of which glittered with inlaid brass, silver, gold, amber, and ivory; but no such splendour was seen in the dwellings of the Heraclidean princes. The palace of the two kings of Sparta,+ said to have been built by Aristodemus 490 B.C., at the taking of the town, was found remarkable. Here Agesilaus lived after the manner of his ancestors; the doors, even in his time, being, according to Xenophon, those of the original building, and turning on two pivots, one in the centre of the top of the door, the other at the bottom; so that one half of the door turned inwards, the other out. Hence Leontychides the elder, when on a visit, asked his host at Corinth-which city had become rich and addicted to luxury-on seeing the ceiling ornamented with (parvíμara,) lacunary, or sunken panels, whether the trees in Corinth were naturally four-cornered.‡

Though there still exist in Greece splendid temples to show the magnificence of the sacred architecture of the Greeks, yet their domestic architecture, like that of the Egyptians, is passed away into annihilation. Our description of these habitations, both in their country and towns, must therefore be sought from other sources. The Abbé Barthelemy, in his account of the travels of Anacharsis the younger in Greece, in the fourth century B.C., says the houses in Athens which he visited had two stories, and two private sets of apartments; the upper story was for the women and the lower for the men. When the house consisted of one story, the apartments of the men were in the front and the women's in the back, surrounded by a square colonnade like a convent, in the centre of which was a plateau. These apartments were approached by a long narrow alley or passage, (Vitruvius who has also described the Greek houses styles it a journey,) at each end of which was a lodge for a eunuch, who acted as porter, no men being permitted to enter this cloister except the husband and near relations. In the front of the house there was generally a court-yard, enclosed by a wall or screen, which separated the house from the street, like Burlington-house in Piccadilly, London, containing within a large portico, under which was the front door of the house, entrusted to the care of a eunuch. Sometimes there was placed here either a figure of Mercury, supposed to drive away thieves, or a dog, an animal which was considered a much more effectual guard,§ and there was almost always an altar here in honour of Apollo, on which the master of the house sacrificed on certain days.|| At the back of the house was a garden, and in the middle a square colonnade opening on a grass-plot in the centre.¶ Plutarch says the Grecian houses were light, airy, and commodious, and that it was generally the custom to have a palm-tree before the front of the door in the court-yard.**

Greek towns in general consisted of poor, mean houses, irregular streets, lanes like alleys, and shops

* Perhaps this only means squared and well-wrought stones, which might be said to be polished when compared with the Cyclopean masonry of rough stone, which had hitherto been used in Greece. The ruins of Mycena being anterior to the time of Homer, contain specimens of an architecture very different from the early Doric. The artisans of that time were chiefly engaged in the construction of treasuries, not of temples, which afterwards served for the same purpose as the former. Another fact deducible from the ruins of Mycenae, as well as from the description left by Pausanias and others of the Greek buildings of those times, is that the early colonies of Egypt, although they introduced some of the mythology of that country, did not transplant its arts in any great degree, for there is nothing at Mycenae bearing any resemblance to the monuments of Egypt; nor, indeed, have the temples in Greece any similarity to those of Egypt beyond the existence of columns, which are so natural an invention, that they are found in the huts or caves of similar climates in every part of the world, and in the course of improvement, have become the principal ornaments of sacred buildings in the most distant countries. (Colonel Leake's Morea, iii. 271.)

It was the custom here for two kings to rule together.

Müller's Dorians, ii. 272.

§ If not a real dog, there were frequently two painted on the walls, one on each side of the front door. Aristoph. in Vesp., v. 870.

Anacharsis' Travels, vol. ii. p. 446. ** In the front of the house was generally a couri-yard, separated from the street by a wall. Towards the street were

small and unglazed like those of our poulterers' shops in London, with trellis-work in front. The narrowness of the streets, however, was more valued than light ways by residents in that climate, on account of the intensity of the solar rays. Professor Müller observes, that the towns on the Peloponnesus are, for the most part, irregularly built, whereas we are informed by Pausaniast that the Ionians had learnt to lay out their streets in straight lines, a custom which Hippodamus of Miletus succeeded in spreading over the rest of Greece.‡ It was probably this architect who, in the year 445 B.C, laid down the plan of Thuriæ in exact squares, with streets at right angles,§ and the same who, in his old age, built the city of Rhodes (467 B.C.) with such perfect symmetry, that to the astonished ancients it seemed like one house.|| Homer gives us but a partial account of the country-house of Laertes in his Odyssey, but sufficient to show that it was one story high, and constructed round a court like an exchange:

"Here stood the mansion of the rural sort,
With useful buildings round the lowly court,
Where the few servants, that divide his care,
Took their laborious rest and homely fare."

(Odyssey, b. xxiv.)

He also describes a Grecian sylvan cottage with its accompanying scenery:

"Ulysses musing, o'er the mountain stray'd

Through mazy thickets of the woodland shade,
And cover'd ways, the shaggy coast along,
With cliffs and nodding forests overhung;
Eumæus at his sylvan lodge he sought,

A faithful servant and without a fault;
And here he found him, busied as he sate

Before the threshold of his rustic gate.

Around the mansion in a circle shone

A rural portico of rugged stone.¶

The walls were stone, from neighbouring quarries borne,
Encircled with a fence of native thorn;

And strong with pales, by many a weary stroke

Of stubborn labour, hewn from native oak.

While thick within the shady space were rear'd

Twelve equal cells, the lodgment of his herd.
Now enter this my homely roof and see,
Our woods not void of hospitality,

He said, and seconded the kind request,
With friendly step precedes his unknown guest,
A shaggy goat's soft hide beneath him spread,
And with fresh rushes heap'd an ample bed."
(Odyssey, b. xiv.)

Homer, in his description of domestic buildings, always heaps riches upon riches, and ornament above ornament, so as to make that dazzling which he cannot render great. This, however, while it

the Oupa avλov (Herod. vi. 69.), in the house the eyyureρw TVAŋ. Plutarch. Lac. Apophthegm. of Leontychides. (6 Apıσrwvoc is in error, p. 215.) It was the custom at Sparta not to knock, but to call at the outer gate. (Plutarch's Instit. Lac. p. 253.) The same was also the custom among the Eolians, so says Alcone in the poems of Theocritus, xxix. 39.

* When Le Roy, a French architect, was in Greece, he tells us, that the citizens and their cattle slept on the same floor in different apartments; and he was surprised, he said, on seeing the oxen, goats, and sheep pass before him peaceably to their respective rooms. (Le Roy's Greece.) The same custom prevails in Switzerland among the mountain shepherds for the sake of warmth and security.-(See Coxe's Travels, and Dr. Beattie's Switzerland Illustrated.)

Pausan. vi. 24. 2.

The first attempts of the Ionian artists were rude; but their emulation of each other, joined with the desire of obtaining the public approbation, rendered their efforts more successful; and it appeared that when Greece did not possess a singie monument of the arts, there existed in Ionia many of those edifices, the ruins of which still exhibit some of the most finished models of architecture ever produced by human ingenuity.--(Ibid.)

§ Diod. xi. 140.

|| Meuroius, Rhod. 1. 10.

This was evidently a circular residence.