Here we find, at last, a direct similarity in taste; for, different as are their capitals, no one can look at drawings of the columns of the Chehil Minar--the great hall or temple built by Xerxes at Persepolis--without being convinced that there was a near relationship in their style to that of Greece. This resemblance, however, is not to the earliest phase of Greek--the Doric--which was its contemporary, but to its second phase--the Ionic--which, putting aside the chronological difficulty, need not be wondered at, as the Ionian cities had long lain within the Persian monarchy. Yet it goes to prove that the influence of Persian architecture was unconnected with the origin of that of Greece, and only affected its more advanced stage. I view Greek architecture, then, in the main, as an art of spontaneous growth. Its first form, the Doric, as strictly and absolutely Greek; the second, the Ionic, as Greek in the main, but with a few suggestions from the land of the Great King; and the third, the Corinthian, as equally Greek, but with one single suggestion, perhaps from Egypt; the whole as the spontaneous creation of that most wonderful, in intellectual power, of all the races of man--that race, inspired as it would almost seem, of God, to be our instructors in literature and art, and our initiators in science, just as was another people to be the teachers of His holy religion. The actual origin of Greek architecture is buried in impenetrable obscurity. If the building called the Treasury of Atreus, or the Tomb of Agamemnon, was really of that period, it would distinctly prove that what we now know as Grecian architecture was unknown to the heroes in the “Iliad,” inasmuch as over its entrance remains a little piece of highly-decorative columnar work, bearing no resemblance to the subsequent architecture of Greece, and going far to prove that these early inhabitants of Greece had a style of building which did not evince a timber but a stone original. Of these early structures, including the Cyclopean walls of the Pelasgian cities, Mr. Freeman eloquently remarks:--“These awful remains of the world’s youth stand before us as the relics of unrecorded days, of the dim times of poetic legend, enveloped as they were in religious mystery for ages before a line of what we deem ancient history was penned. The historians and philosophers of the days of Pericles knew no more of the authors of these gigantic fragments than ourselves; all that survived, even to them, were the shadows of fallen greatness, the feeble echoes of a voice long since hushed in death. Our ancients had to explore the remains of these far earlier days by the same faint glimmerings of legend and tradition as ourselves ... and to us, whose early youth is spent among the immortal lays, whose living substance is called up by even the pictured resemblance of these massive piles--monuments, as we would fain believe, of the days of Achilles and the Atridæ, and the old time before them--to