e, to
accommodate the crowds of worshippers as well as priests. But these
enormous structures were not marked by beauty of proportion or fitness
of ornament; they show the power of kings, not the genius of a nation.
They may have compelled awe; they did not kindle admiration. The emotion
they called out was such as is produced now by great engineering
exploits, involving labor and mechanical skill, not suggestive of grace
or harmony, which require both taste and genius. The same is probably
true of Solomon's temple, built at a much later period, when Art had
been advanced somewhat by the Phoenicians, to whose assistance it seems
he was much indebted. We cannot conceive how that famous structure
should have employed one hundred and fifty thousand men for eleven
years, and have cost what would now be equal to $200,000,000, from any
description which has come down to us, or any ruins which remain, unless
it were surrounded by vast courts and colonnades, and ornamented by a
profuse expenditure of golden plates,--which also evince both power and
money rather than architectural genius.

After the erection of temples came the building of palaces for kings,
equally distinguished for vast magnitude and mechanical skill, but
deficient in taste and beauty, showing the infancy of Art. Yet even
these were in imitation of the temples. And as kings became proud and
secular, probably their palaces became grander and larger,--like the
palaces of Nebuchadnezzar and Rameses the Great and the Persian monarchs
at Susa, combining labor, skill, expenditure, dazzling the eye by the
number of columns and statues and vast apartments, yet still deficient
in beauty and grace.

It was not until the Greeks applied their wonderful genius to
architecture that it became the expression of a higher civilization.
And, as among Egyptians, Art in Greece is first seen in temples; for the
earlier Greeks were religious, although they worshipped the deity under
various names, and in the forms which their own hands did make.

The Dorians, who descended from the mountains of northern Greece, eighty
years after the fall of Troy, were the first who added substantially to
the architectural art of Asiatic nations, by giving simplicity and
harmony to their temples. We see great thickness of columns, a fitting
proportion to the capitals, and a beautiful entablature. The horizontal
lines of the architrave and cornice predominate over the vertical lines
of the columns