But whatever defects marked the age of Diocletian and Constantine, it can never be questioned that the Romans carried architecture to a perfection rarely attained in our times.  They may not have equalled the severe simplicity of their teachers the Greeks, but they surpassed them in the richness of their decorations, and in all buildings designed for utility, especially in private houses and baths and theatres.

The Romans do not seem to have used other than semicircular arches.  The Gothic, or Pointed, or Christian architecture, as it has been variously called, was the creation of the Middle Ages, and arose almost simultaneously in Europe after the first Crusade, so that it would seem to be of Eastern origin.  But it was a graft on the old Roman arch, in the curve of the ellipse rather than the circle.

Aside from this invention of the arch, to which we are indebted for the most beautiful ecclesiastical structures ever erected, we owe everything in architecture to the Greeks and Romans.  We have found out no new principles which were not known to Vitruvius.  No one man was the inventor or creator of the wonderful structures which ornamented the cities of the ancient world.  We have the names of great architects, who reared various and faultless models, but they all worked upon the same principles, and these can never be subverted; so that in architecture the ancients are our schoolmasters, whose genius we revere the more we are acquainted with their works.  What more beautiful than one of those grand temples which the cultivated heathen Greeks erected to the worship of their unknown gods!—­the graduated and receding stylobate as a base for the fluted columns, rising at regular distances in all their severe proportion and matchless harmony, with their richly carved capitals supporting an entablature of heavy stones, most elaborately moulded and ornamented with the figures of plants and animals; and rising above this, on the ends of the temple, or over a portico several columns deep, the pediment, covered with chiselled cornices, with still richer ornaments rising from the apices and at the feet, all carved in white marble, and then spread over an area larger than any modern churches, making a forest of columns to bear aloft those ponderous beams of stone, without anything tending to break the continuity of horizontal lines, by which the harmony and simplicity of the whole are regulated!  So accurately squared and nicely adjusted were the stones and pillars of which these temples were composed, that there was scarcely need even of cement.  Without noise or confusion or sound of hammers did those temples rise, since all their parts were cut and carved in the distant quarries, and with mathematical precision.  And within the cella, nearly concealed by surrounding columns, were the statues of the gods, and the altars on which incense was offered, or sacrifices made.  In every part, interior and exterior, do we see a matchless proportion and beauty, whether