We may say almost the same of the great temple which he adorned with his genius. It is just that perfection of the Doric temple which has escaped from the somewhat ponderous massiveness and simplicity of the older architecture, while it sacrificed no element of majesty to that grace and delicacy which marks, later and more developed Greek architecture. On this Acropolis the Athenians determined to show what architecture could reach in majesty and what in delicacy. So they set up the Parthenon in that absolute perfection where strength and solidity come out enhanced, but in no way overlaid, with ornament. They also built the Erechtheum, where they adopted the Ionic Order, and covered their entablature with bands of small and delicate tracing, which, with its gilding and coloring, was a thing to be studied minutely and from the nearest distance. Though the inner columns of the Propylæa were Ionic (and they were very large), it appears that large temples in that Order were not known in Attica. But for small and graceful buildings it was commonly used, and of these the Erechtheum was the most perfect. In its great days, and even as Pausanias saw it, the Acropolis was covered with statues, as well as with shrines. It was not merely an Holy of Holies in religion; it was also a palace and museum of art. At every step and turn the traveller met new objects of interest. There were archaic specimens, chiefly interesting to the antiquarian and the devotee; there were the great masterpieces which were the joint admiration of the artist and the vulgar. Even all the sides and slopes of the great rock were honeycombed into sacred grottos, with their altars and their gods, or studded with votive monuments. All these lesser things are fallen away and gone; the sacred caves are filled with rubbish and desecrated with worse than neglect. The grotto of Pan and Apollo is difficult of access, and was, when I first saw it, an object of disgust rather than of interest. There are left but the remnants of the surrounding wall, and the ruins of the three principal buildings, which were the envy and wonder of all the civilized world.