the first and practical one is; Do the columns afford sufficient support?—the second and æsthetic one is; Is there also appearance of sufficient support; or, is there any thing contradictory to principle, to judgment, and good taste? The first question needs no answer, since it answers itself, it being an indisputable fact that columns so employed do answer the purpose to which they are turned. The other question is not so easily answered: the prejudiced will of course answer it according to their own contracted taste and narrow notions, condemning the mode alluded to, without any inquiry into its merits and advantages, merely on the ground of its being quite at variance with the classical system of _trabeated_ columniation, that is, with columns supporting a horizontal architrave and entablature, or general horizontal _trabeation_. That by the substitution of arches for architraves, the character of the Greek system is forfeited, cannot be denied; but then another character is established, whose difference from the original one ought not to be made its condemnation. To demand of a different mode that it should resemble and conform to the laws of that from which it differs, is absurdity in the extreme, for it is requiring that it should be at once a different one and the same. To compare different styles is a very useful sort of study; but to make any one style the criterion or standard by which others are to be judged, is preposterous. [7] This mode of uniting together columns and arches is perfectly legitimate, whereas that in which a fragment of the usual entablature is left sticking or added to each column, (as, for instance, in the interior of St. Martin’s Church,) is decidedly solecistical, since it is injuriously reminiscent of _epistylar_ construction or trabeation,—is in itself unmeaning, and causes the columns to appear to have been too short, and therefore to have been eked out in height by blocks upon them, fashioned to resemble so many detached bits of an entablature. The style in which the arch and column enter into direct combination with each other, and for which there is no specific name, has at all events some economical recommendations, inasmuch as shorter columns, and fewer of them, are required, than would be necessary for the same height and length according to the trabeated mode. In itself, too, it possesses much ‘capability;’ yet, as is the case with every other style, the merit of the works produced in it depends upon the manner in which it is treated, and the talent brought to it. There is no style of the Art so poetical that the flattest prose may not be made out of it; and hardly any so utterly prosaic as to be incapable of being kindled into poetry by the Promethean torch of geniality—artistic treatment, and, _con amore_, æsthetic feeling. INTERCOLUMNIATION.