r purpose, and
the skill with which they altered and refined, and almost redesigned,
everything which they so selected.

[Illustration: FIG. 82.--GREEK DOORWAY SHOWING CORNICE.]

[Illustration: FIG. 83.--GREEK DOORWAY. FRONT VIEW. (FROM THE
ERECHTHEIUM.)]

During the whole period when Greek art was being developed, the
ancient and polished civilisation of Egypt constituted a most
powerful and most stable influence, always present,--always,
comparatively speaking, within reach,--and always the same. Of all the
forms of column and capital existing in Egypt, the Greeks, however,
only selected that straight-sided fluted type of which the Beni-Hassan
example is the best known, but by no means the only instance. We first
meet with these fluted columns at Corinth, of very sturdy proportions,
and having a wide, swelling, clumsy moulding under the abacus by way
of a capital. By degrees the proportions of the shaft grew more
slender, and the profile of the capital more elegant and less bold,
till the perfected perfections of the Greek Doric column were
attained. This column is the original to which all columns with
moulded capitals that have been used in architecture, from the age of
Pericles to our own, may be directly or indirectly referred; while the
Egyptian types which the Greeks did not select--such, for example, as
the lotus-columns at Karnak--have never been perpetuated.

A different temper or taste, and partly a different history, led to
the selection of the West Asiatic types of column by a section of the
Greek people; but great alterations in proportion, in the treatment of
the capital, and in the management of the moulded base from which the
columns sprang, were made, even in the orders which occur in the Ionic
buildings of Asia Minor. This was carried further when the Ionic order
was made use of in Athens herself, and as a result the Attic base and
the perfected Ionic capital are to be found at their best in the
Erechtheium example. The Ionic order and the Corinthian, which soon
followed it, are the parents,--not, it is true, of all, but of the
greater part of the columns with foliated capitals that have been used
in all styles and periods of architecture since. It will not be
forgotten that rude types of both orders are found represented on
Assyrian bas-reliefs, but still the Corinthian capital and order must
be considered as the natural and, so to speak, inevitable development
of the Ionic. From the