to occupy a conspicuous place in a landscape, without any appearance of intrusion.  The glance of the beholder rises from the labyrinth of terrace and arbor beneath, almost weariedly; it meets, as it ascends, with a gradual increase of bright marble and simple light, and with a proportionate diminution of dark foliage and complicated shadow, till it rests finally on a piece of simple brilliancy, chaste and unpretending, yet singularly dignified; and does not find its color too harsh, because its form is so simple:  for color of any kind is only injurious when the eye is too much attracted to it; and, when there is so much quietness of detail as to prevent this misfortune, the building will possess the cheerfulness, without losing the tranquillity, and will seem to have been erected, and to be inhabited, by a mind of that beautiful temperament wherein modesty tempers majesty, and gentleness mingles with rejoicing, which, above all others, is most suited to the essence, and most interwoven with the spirit, of the natural beauty whose peculiar power is invariably repose.

125.  So much for its general character.  Considered by principles of composition, it will also be found beautiful.  Its prevailing lines are horizontal; and every artist knows that, where peaks of any kind are in sight, the lines above which they rise ought to be flat.  It has not one acute angle in all its details, and very few intersections of verticals with horizontals; while all that do intersect seem useful as supporting the mass.  The just application of the statues at the top is more doubtful, and is considered reprehensible by several high authorities, who, nevertheless, are inconsistent enough to let the balustrade pass uncalumniated, though it is objectionable on exactly the same grounds; for, if the statues suggest the inquiry of “What are they doing there?” the balustrade compels its beholder to ask, “whom it keeps from tumbling over?”

126.  The truth is, that the balustrade and statues derive their origin from a period when there was easy access to the roof of either temple or villa; (that there was such access is proved by a passage in the Iphigenia Taurica, line 113, where Orestes speaks of getting up to the triglyphs of a Doric temple as an easy matter;) and when the flat roofs were used, not, perhaps, as an evening promenade, as in Palestine, but as a place of observation, and occasionally of defense.  They were composed of large flat slabs of stone ([Greek:  keramos,[20]]) peculiarly adapted for walking, one or two of which, when taken up, left an opening of easy access into the house, as in Luke v. 19, and were perpetually used in Greece as missile weapons, in the event of a hostile attack or sedition in the city, by parties of old men, women, and children, who used, as a matter of course, to retire to the roof as a place of convenient defense.  By such attacks from the roof with the [Greek:  keramos] the Thebans were thrown into confusion in Plataea (Thucydides ii. 4.).  So, also, we find the roof immediately resorted to in the case of the starving of Pausanias in the Temple of Minerva of the Brazen House, and in that of the massacre of the aristocratic party at Corcyra (Thucydides iv. 48):—­[Greek:  Anabantes de epi to tegos tou oikematos, kai dielontes ten orophen, eballon to keramo].