Each nation in the old time had an expression of its thoughts in the buildings in which it housed its gods, its government, and its individuals, which was as distinctive as its language: a tongue, indeed, in stone, in colour and in form, as plain as, indeed plainer than, ever words could frame. The Egyptian, with the flat square lines of the gigantic slabs placed across the forests of enormous rounded pillars closely packed, the avenues of sphinxes and obelisks leading up (never at right angles, curiously to our sense of conformity) to the temples--solemn, heavy, magnificent, mysterious--with a sentiment of dignified repose, though little of beauty or proportion, but full of symbolism and suggestion and grandeur. The exquisite Greek buildings, where proportion was almost like music in its scientific harmony of parts, so exact, so modulated, so severe, so lovely--with sculpture forming an almost necessary portion of the architectural design when at its highest point of excellence. The Saracenic, with its simple grace of construction and delicate detail of ornament, with holy words and combinations of lines in place of natural forms, and soaring beauty of domes, and pierced marble work. The Middle Age Italian, with its inlaid and decorated façades and wealth of columns, and traceries of gay-coloured stones, and contrasts of brilliant light and dark shadows in the deep-set windows and doors,--bright and lovely like Giotto's Campanile at Florence, rising like a flower over the city, or great churches like those of Orvieto and St. Mark's,[1] with their rich profusion of mosaic and carved stone and quaint modifications of brickwork. Or the buildings of the Gothic nations (our own included), which often, like those at Mont St. Michel, seem to have so grown out of the situation--where the Art is so interwoven with Nature, that it is hardly possible to discover where one begins and the other ends. There is something also of the manner in which Nature works, in the feeling with which the curves interlace, seeming almost to grow into each other, in a Gothic cathedral. In the perspectives of heavy round arches of Winchester and Durham, in the upward soaring of the Salisbury spire, there is the same impression--they seem to have "come" so. It is like a living organism, the parts of which are as natural and necessary to the whole as is the growth of a tree: like the recipe of old for a poet, they seem to have been "born, not made." All these different races invented for themselves what is called a "style;" that is to say, an original manner, peculiar and adapted to their special idiosyncrasies, of fulfilling those wants which every nation, as soon as it emerges from the savage state, must feel and provide for in some fashion.