[Illustration: 

Greek.

Roman.]

Look upon this picture, and on this!—­the one, refined, delicate, sensitive, fastidious, severe, never repeated; the other, thoughtless, vulgar, mathematical, common-sense, sensuous, reappearing ever with a stolid monotony.  And such is the sentiment pervading all Roman Art.  The conquerors took the letter from the Greeks, but never had the slightest feeling for its Ideal.  But even this letter, when they transcribed it, writhed and was choked beneath hands which knew better the iron caestus of the gladiator than the subtile and spiritual touch of the artist.

We can have no stronger and more convincing proof that Architecture is the truest record of the various phases of civilization than we find in this.  There was Greek Art, living and beautiful, full of inductive power and capacities of new expressions; and there were the boundless wealth and power of Rome.  But Rome had her own ideas to enunciate; and so possessed was she with the impulse to give form to these ideas, to her ostentatious brutality, her barbarous pride, her licentious magnificence, that she could not pause to learn calm and serious lessons from the Greeks who walked her very forums, but, seizing their fair sanctuaries, she stretched them out to fit her standard; she took the pure Greek orders to decorate her arches, she piled these orders one above the other, she bent them around her gigantic circuses, till at last they had become acclimated and lost all their peculiar refinement, all their intellectual and dignified humanity.  Every moulding, every capital, every detail was changed.  The Romans had neither time nor inclination to bestow any love or thought on the expressiveness and tender meaning of subordinate parts.  But out of the suggestions and reminiscences of Greek lines they made a rigid and inflexible grammar of their own,—­a grammar to suit the mailed clang of Roman speech, which, in its cruel martial strength, sought no refinements, no delicate inflections from a distant Acropolis.  The result was the coarse splendor of the Empire.  How utterly the still Greek Ideal was forgotten in this noisy splendor, how entirely the chaste spirituality of the Greek line was lost in the round and lusty curves which are the inevitable footprints of Sensual Life, scarcely needs further amplification.  I have referred to the Ionic capital of the Erechtheum as containing a microcosm of Attic Art, as presenting a fair epitome of the thought and love which Hellenic artists offered in the worship of their gods.  Turn now to the Roman Ionic, as developed in any one of the most familiar examples of it, in the Temple of Concord, near the Via Sacra, in the Theatre of Marcellus, or the Colosseum.  What a contrast!  How formal, mechanical, pattern-like it has become!  The grace of its freedom, the intellectual reserve of its strength, the secret humanity that thrilled through all its lines, the divine Art which obtained