the Government. This
scholar was Henri Labrouste. While in Italy, his attention was directed
to the Greek temples of Paestum. Trained, as he had been, in the
strictest academic architecture of the Renaissance, he was struck by
many points of difference between these temples and the Palladian
formulae which had hitherto held despotic sway over his studies. In
grand and minor proportions, in the disposition of triglyphs in the
frieze, in mouldings and general sentiment, he perceived a remarkable
freedom from the restraints of his school,--a freedom which, so far from
detracting from the grandeur of the architecture, gave to it a degree of
life and refinement which his appreciative eye now sought for in vain
among the approved models of the Academy. Studying these new revelations
with love and veneration, it was not long before the pure Hellenic
spirit, confined in the severe peristyles and cellas of the Paestum
temples, entered into his heart, with all its elastic capacities, all
its secret and mysterious sympathies for the new life which had sprung
up during its long imprisonment in those stained and shattered marbles.
Labrouste, on his return to Paris, in 1830, surprised the grave
professors of the Academy, Le Bas, Baltard, and the rest, by presenting
to them, as the result of his studies, carefully elaborated drawings
of the temples at Paestum. Witnessing, with pious horror, the grave
departures from their rules contained in the drawings of their former
favorite, they charged him with error, even as a copyist. True to their
prejudices, their eyes did not penetrate beyond the outward type, and
they at once began to find technical objections. They told him, never
did such an absurdity occur in classic architecture as a triglyph on a
corner! Palladio and the Italian masters never committed such an obvious
crime against propriety, nor could an instance of it be found in all
Roman antiquities. It was in vain that poor Labrouste upheld the
accuracy of his work, and reminded the Academy that among the Roman
models no instance had been found of a Doric corner,--that this order
occurred only so ruined that no corner was left for examination, or in
the grand circumferences of the Colosseum and the Theatre of Marcellus,
where, from the nature of the case, no corner could be. The professors
still maintained the integrity of their long-established ordinances,
and, to disprove the assertions of the young pretender, even sent
a commi