colossal sphinxes, and all adorned with obelisks and columns, and surrounded with courts and colonnades, like Solomon’s temple, 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.  The temple arises in the severity of geometrical forms.  The Doric column was not entirely a new creation, but was an improvement on the Egyptian model,—­less massive, more elegant, fluted, increasing gradually towards the base, with a slight convexed swelling downward, about six diameters in height, superimposed by capitals.  “So regular was the plan of the temple, that if the dimensions