us every rugged stone seems vocal with some old heroic legend. Each gateway may have seen the marshalling of heroes arrayed to man the thousand ships of Argos, and to wait upon their chariot-wheels, to whom Zeus had consigned her twofold throne and sceptre.” The difficulty is to explain how, in a country where a distinctly stone architecture (stone not only in fact but in idea) had for ages existed, it could be suddenly changed for an architecture evidently based upon a timber ideal. Were it only the Cyclopian walls of the old cities which remained, the perplexity would be less. Such walls exist also in Etruria; yet we gather from Vitruvius that the Etruscan temples had a construction founded upon timber. It is that little scrap of actual columnar architecture at Mycenæ which defies explanation, but which is thought to point to an Assyrian original. The Dorians, however, were a different (how different is not known) and an invading race. It may be that their former seat had been in a specially timber country, and their former architecture actually of wood; and that, on migrating into a stone country, they translated their architecture into its prevailing material. The intrinsic marvel, however, is their power to invest an art, so homely in its origin and so simple in its character, with such sublimity of aspect and such refined beauty of detail. But why should we wonder at this? Look for a moment at their figure-sculpture even in its first archaic simplicity, and we need not wonder at what such men could do. But, oh! look at it again, after the desolating Persian had been driven from their shores, when the shattered institutions of Greece had been re-established, and her ruined temples restored; when national glory, self-gratulation, and thankfulness had given a new and generous impulse to every feeling of the great mind and soul of Greece; and see then what art they produced (you know it right well in the Elgin-room at our own museum), and you need not wonder at any other miracles of art that they performed! I am not going to drag you through all the changes in ancient architecture: you will see for yourselves how the majesty of the Doric Temple was succeeded by the greater refinement and elegance of the Ionic, and the richness of the Corinthian, though their developments were not exclusive of one another like those of Mediæval art, but cumulative and practised side by side. I confess that, so far as capitals are concerned, I agree with Mr. Ruskin in thinking the first and the last each more reasonable than the second. The moulded capital and the foliated capital are things of all time. The voluted capital was an accidental introduction from the East, and has no permanent meaning, wonderful though it be.