conventional, why does Vitruvius speak of four of the principal temples of Greece as “having raised their architects to the summit of renown”? Why is it that Rhœcus and Theodorus, Ictinus, Mnesicles, Dinocrates, Detrianus, Apollodorus and many other architects—to whom more particular mention will be made later—are remembered in ancient history with more or less circumstantiality, not only in association with their works—all conventional, if we are to accept this writer’s judgment—but also on account of their individual merit, while the architects of the buildings which departed most from that same conventionality, both in plan and detail, as, for example, the Erechtheum, the original Odeon of Pericles and even the Coliseum itself, where: “Firm Doric pillars formed the solid base, The fair Corinthian crown the higher space, And all below is strength, and all above is grace,” are lost in the ocean of oblivion? Do not our modern authors overlook the fact that the architects of their own age share, as a rule, in the same popular indifference, and that the period of revival is no exception to the period of inception; that the one has inherited from the other not only the forms and principles of its art, but the same neglect of its artists? Whether this is true or not, the fact must remain and be accepted with patience or impatience, as we please, that there is little preserved for us by the ancient writers in respect to their architects. Two rather conspicuous exceptions, however, occur to this general rule in respect to Pausanias, the Lydian, and Vitruvius Pollio, the Roman. Pausanias lived toward the close of the second century after Christ. He was a great traveller and a close observer, his observations having been confined principally to works of art, such as public buildings, temples and statues, which he mentions in direct and simple language. He visited most of the states of Greece at a time when that country was still rich in her treasures of art, and what he has to say of what he saw there would tend to indicate that while he was by no means a critic or a connoisseur, he was still a faithful and minute recorder of what appealed to his taste or excited his curiosity.