How utterly the still Greek Ideal was forgotten in this noisy splendor, how entirely the chaste spirituality of the Greek line was lost in the round and lusty curves which are the _inevitable_ footprints of Sensual Life, scarcely needs further amplification. I have referred to the Ionic capital of the Erechtheum as containing a microcosm of Attic Art, as presenting a fair epitome of the thought and love which Hellenic artists offered in the worship of their gods. Turn now to the Roman Ionic, as developed in any one of the most familiar examples of it, in the Temple of Concord, near the Via Sacra, in the Theatre of Marcellus, or the Colosseum. What a contrast! How formal, mechanical, pattern-like it has become! The grace of its freedom, the intellectual reserve of its strength, the secret humanity that thrilled through all its lines, the divine Art which obtained such sweet repose there,--all these are gone. Quality has yielded to quantity, and nothing is left save those external characteristics which he who runs may read, and he who pauses to study finds cold, vacant, and unsatisfactory. What the Ionic capital of Rome wants, and what all Roman Art wants, is _the inward life_, the living soul, which gives a peculiar expressiveness to every individual work, and raises it infinitely above the dangerous academic formalism of the schools. In view of our own architecture, that which touches our own experience and is of us and out of us, the danger of this academic formalism cannot be too emphatically spoken of. When one carefully examines the transition from Greek to Roman Art, he cannot but be impressed with the fact, that the spirit which worked in this transition was the spirit of a vulgar and greedy conqueror. To illustrate his rude magnificence and to give a finer glory to his triumph, by right of conquest he appropriated the Greek orders. But the living soul which was in those orders, and gave them an infinity of meaning, an ever-varying poetry of expression, could not be enslaved; nor could the worshipful Love which created them find a home under the helmet of the soldier. So they became lifeless; they were at once formally systematized and classified, subjected to strict proportions and rules, and cast, as it were, in moulds. This arrangement enabled the conqueror, without waste of time in that long contemplative stillness out of which alone the beauty of the true Ideal arises, out of which alone man can create like a god, to avail himself at once of the Greek orders, not as a sensitive and delicate means of fine aesthetic expression, but as a mechanical language of contrasts of form to be used according to the exigencies of design. The service of Greek Art was perfect freedom; enslaved at Rome, it became academic. Thus systematized, it is true, it awes us by the superb redundancy and sumptuousness of its use in the temples and forums reared by that omnipresent power from Britannia to Baalbec. But the Art which is systematized is degraded.