world metropolis, have been renovated and reconstructed, the work
in fact going on continuously.

For some of the most effective of our urban elaborations we must go back
to the first of city builders of whom we have knowledge. The Assyrians
made terraces, nature teaching them. On the level plain building ground
was raised forty feet for effect. Like all artists of precivilization,
the Assyrians placed adornment before convenience, as appeared in
Nineveh on the Tigris and Babylon on the Euphrates. At Thebes and
Palmyra it was the same, their palaces of alabaster, if one chooses
to believe what is said, covering, some of them, a hundred acres.
The fashion now is to build upward rather than outward. Besides this
alabaster acreage there are to be taken into account the pyramids,
artificial mountains, and endless towertowns, supposed to be an
improvement on whatever existed before their time. Around the
Mediterranean and over India way were once hundreds of charming places
like the Megara suburb of Carthage and the amphitheatre of Rhodes,
prolific in classic art and architecture, precious gifts of the gods.

But before all other gods or gifts comes Athens, where the men were as
gods and the gods very like the men. Encircling the Acropolis hill--most
ancient cities had their central hill--the city owes its grandeur to the
many temples dedicated to the Olympian deities by the men who made
them, made both deities and temples, that long line of philosophers the
sublimity of whose thoughts civilization fed on and found expression in
the genius of now and then a Pericles or a Phidias.

Twenty times Rome suffered, each time worse than ever befell an American
city, the debris of destruction overspreading her sacred soil some
fathoms deep, yet all the while mistress of the world.

The Moors in Spain reconstructed and embellished many cities, and
built many entire. To them Spain owes her finest specimens of art and
architecture, as Seville, Cordova, and the Alhambra. In Naples the
mediaeval still overshadows the modern. The city needs cleansing, though
she flourishes in her filth and volcanic belchings. Nice, like
Paris, plans to please her guests. Berlin was a little late with her
reconstructive work; the town walls were not removed till 1866. Though
dating from 1190, Glasgow is practically modern, having been several
times renovated by fire. Antwerp, burned in 1871, was quickly rebuilt.
The Hague is charming as the city of peac