Even when we descend to the lowest walks of architecture we find this principle prevailing. It would require an immense amount of design and good taste to make the thin walls and thinner roof of a brick and slated cottage look as picturesque or so well as one built of rubble-stone, or even with mud walls, and a thatched roof: the thickness and solidity of the one must always be more satisfactory than the apparent flimsiness of the other. Here, as in most cases, necessity controls the architect; but when fettered by no utilitarian exigencies, there is no safer or readier means of obtaining an effect than this, and when effect alone is sought it is almost impossible for an architect to err in giving too much solidity to his building. Size and stability are alone sufficient to produce grandeur in architectural design, and, where sublimity is aimed at, they are the two elements most essential to its production, and are indeed the two without which it cannot possibly be attained. VI.—DURABILITY. As the complement to stability, the length of time during which architectural objects are calculated to endure confers on them an impress of durability which can hardly be attained by any of the sister arts. Sculpture may endure as long, and some of the Egyptian examples of that art found near the Pyramids are as old as anything in that country, but it is not their age that impresses us so much as the story they have to tell. The Pyramids, on the other hand, in the majesty of their simple Technic grandeur, do challenge a quasi-eternity of duration with a distinctness that is most impressive, and which there, as elsewhere, is one of the most powerful elements of architectural expression. When Horace sang— “Vixêre fortes ante Agamemnona Multi, sed omnes illacrimabiles Urgentur ignotique longâ Nocte, carent quia vate sacro,” he overlooked the fact that long before Troy was dreamt of, Egyptian kings had raised pyramids which endure to the present day, and the Pharaohs of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth dynasties had filled the valley of the Upper Nile with temples and palaces and tombs which tell us not only the names of their founders, but reveal to us their thoughts and aspirations with a distinctness that no sacred poet could as well convey. From that time onward the architects have covered the world with monuments that still remain on the spot where they were erected, and tell all, who are sufficiently instructed to read their riddles aright, what nations once occupied these spots, what degree of civilisation they had reached, and how, in erecting these monuments on which we now gaze, they had attained that quasi-immortality after which they hankered.