do not become enthusiastic over it; yet, so much are we influenced by prejudice, that the rude colouring of the Greek temples which the Turks plastered over the buildings they occupied during the seventeenth century, is supposed to be correct taste. Even yet it is commonly, very commonly, believed, that the colouring belongs to the Greek period, and the plaints of even so great an authority as Stuart are touching. I was astonished to find in his preface to the careful volume on Athens, the following:--“Yet there is one circumstance of comparatively recent discovery, and still more recently ascertained to its full extent, which gives a strange contradiction to our cherished notions concerning the purity of Grecian taste, and its antipathy to all coarseness and exaggeration. It should seem that the Greeks painted their temples, not merely in chiaroscuro, or in subdued tints, for the purpose of giving relief to projections or expressiveness to ornamental details, but with glaring colours,--reds, blues, and yellows, with violent contrasts; the columns one hue, and the entablature another. Nay,” he says, “there is shrewd suspicion that the sculptures were painted like the figure-head of a man-of-war, and that the pillars were striped, and unluckily the evidences of these incredibilities is most exasperatingly clear; the statements of the German architects employed by King Otho leave no doubt whatever,” etc. etc.; and I once saw a devout student of Greek art poring over one of those revived temples--the columns and entablature a bright coffee colour, and the triglyphs blue--trying to admire it; he humbly thought he must be wrong, and the Greeks must be right.’ Why, the Turks did all this during their possession. The colours here indicated would be about the Turkman’s idea of correct taste, savouring of the bazaar and booth. They trailed their cannon up the Propylæa, and broke down the carved work thereof with axes and hammers, and soon they set up their banners for tokens. Mnesthenes never coloured the Erechtheum, or Pausanias would have said so in the account of his ramble over it; and Phidias and Praxiteles may fairly be left alone--_they_ never daubed the Parthenon with ochre. The architecture of the Acropolis, great as it is in its own merits, requires a Greek eye and Greek modes of thought to understand thoroughly and to appreciate. Its great and grand idea is calm and dignified repose. It is the repose of the Sphynx or an Egyptian pyramid refined into beauty; and among the rocks of Attica, which are rugged and rough, a Gothic building, such as Strasbourg or Cologne, would be out of place; the crockets and pinnacles would be dwarfed by the igneous rocks that are about, and the Greek well knew how a calm flat surface would harmonise and contrast with the country round.