consumed, not so much by the shock of opposing legions, as by a protracted struggle with fatigue and famine and disease; auxiliaries, to which Spain is already indebted for a partial liberation from his tyranny, and through which we confidently believe that, even if allother more active means of resistance should fail, she would ultimately achieve her complete independence. ART. III. A Treatise of the Ecclesiastical Architecture of England during the Middle Ages, with ten illustrative Plates. By the Rev. John Milner, D. D. F. S. A.&c. Ed. 8vo. London, Taylor. 1811. O NE of the most striking symptoms of the increasing curiosity and intelligence that mark the present generation, is the attention paid to those noble specimens of church architecture, which, after many revolutions in taste and religion, yet remain in England. It is now little more than forty years since they ceased to be regarded with inattention or contempt. Evelyn, from his predilection for the arts of Italy, and Wren, perhaps from professional prejudices, decried the noblest remains of the middle ages, as barbarous and disproportioned, constructed on no principle, and monuments alone of blind zeal, and useless perseverance. The errors of these respectable men are properly yet temperately exposed by Dr. Milner in the work before us: but to the names of Wren and Evelyn we must add, with concern, one of elder and more venerable fame, who has escaped his notice-the accomplished Sir Henry Wotton. As for those arches,' says this excellent judge of Greek and Roman architecture, 'which our artizans call of the third and fourth point, and the Tuscan writers de terzo e de quarto accuto, because they always concurre in an acute angle, and do spring from division of the diameter into three, four, or more parts at pleasure; 1 say, such as these, both for the natural imbecillity of the sharp angle itself, and likewise for their very uncomliness, ought to be exiled from judicious eyes and left to their first inventors, the Gothes and Lumbards, amongst other reliques of that barbarous age.' So thought, on this interesting subject, an Englishman by birth, but an Italian by habit and inclination. And so has it come to pass from that day to the present: for scarcely any traveller has remained long in Italy without contracting some prejudice against the Tramontane architecture of his native country. It is, however, no happy effect of travelling to render a man disgusted for life with objects which, on his return, he must daily behold; and after every concession to the pure architecture of classical antiquity, no impartial judge will maintain it to be so exclusively beautiful as that no other charms charms can possibly be struck out on different and independent principles. The Italian school, however, had its day, and a disastrous day it might have been for the remains of ancient English architecture, had not the exertion and expense which its system required either surpassed the means, or alarmed the indolence of the cathedral clergy, during the century which succeeded the Restoration. It may be attributed, we fear, to the poverty as much as to the selfishness of provincial chapters, that the spirit of innovation did not extend beyond the capital, where, to speak the truth, except perhaps in the destruction of old St. Paul's, it was allowably and usefully exerted for where the original building is actually destroyed, the restoration may, nay must be made on other principles; and the architect is fairly left to his own taste and judgment. Meanwhile our dignitaries slumbered in their stalls with little curiosity to inquire whether the columns which surrounded them were the work of Norman or of English artists; whether a circular arch denoted the eleventh century, or a lancet window the twelfth. To this apathy, however, we are deeply indebted; for after all, they took care that the buildings should not fall to the ground: if they had done more, they would have probably done worse. It was a poet, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, before the gloom of puritanism had extinguished the light of native taste within him, who first proclaimed his love of the high embowed roof;' and it was reserved for two kindred spirits of our earlier days to hold up the torch of their own inspiration to the beauties of ecclesiastical architecture in their own country. Since the time of Gray and Warton, for to those gifted men we allude, the ideas which they suggested, and the principles which they laid down, have been expanded and even improved by many inferior writers. By Dr. Milner, whom (on this subject) we scarcely include in that number, they have been brought as nearly to perfection as a matter not admitting of absolute demonstration, will admit. Though no poet, he is a man of genius, and struck moreover with a ray of inspiration from a source unknown to them—the peculiar spirit of the religion, for the ordinances of which these edifices were constructed. But the principal merit of Dr. Milner's work is practical. To have shewn, as he has done, that from the early Saxon times to the reign of Henry VIII, every age was marked as much by a distinctive style of church architecture, as by idiomatic changes of language, or by progressive alterations in dress and domestic habits; to have shewn by what nice gradation and upon what scientific principles, successive changes in this most ornamental and magnificent mode of building took place, is not merely to prove that our ancestors were something better than barbarians; barbarians; it is also to warn the present depositaries of these precious remains not to turn barbarians themselves. This is an important and timely service:-for no sooner was the eye opened to the beauties of our ancient cathedrals, than the mere feeling of admiration began to be mistaken for taste, alteration for improvement, and whim for skill. In every pursuit which, from its nature, is incapable of being conducted on principles strictly philosophical, a kind of counter-science is always found to pursue the reality, as the shadow follows the substance. Like the physical shadow, too, it requires a certain degree of light to exhibit it. It never appears in ages of total ignorance: it is the spurious produce of halfknowledge and conceit; it flatters wealth; it is fostered by profusion. In church architecture, the era of apathy and indolence was now at an end. The age of improvement began, and from that hour to the present, a mischievous and ever-active race of despoilers, (from the botcher, who improves the ancient beauties of his parish church into nakedness or deformity, to the scientific and tasteless follower of the Italian school, who walls up the side arches, destroys the light and shade, or by the addition of the lady chapel, ruins the perspective of a cathedral,) have been at work over the face of the whole kingdom, with the countenance of the great, and the applause of the vulgar. Meanwhile it is not easy to pronounce whether they have been more mischievously employed in what they preserved or in what they destroyed. We mourn, indeed, over the buried remnants of ancient art as over the grave of a friend; but to see them exposed and misplaced, the ornaments of one century, for example, piled without sense or discrimination on the characteristic and strongly marked foundations of another, and that perhaps a remote one, is to be condemned to behold the mangled limbs of what once was beauty, once was grace,' strewed upon the ground or hung around a wheel. To counteract this work of havoc, Dr. Milner has already lifted up his powerful voice: he will not always, we trust, be unheard. The work, in its present shape, is partly didactic, and partly controversial. The general plan will best be understood from the author's own words. And first with respect to the expansion of his system, already developed with so masterly a hand in the History of Winchester. The following are the outlines of it: first, that the whole style of pointed architecture, with all its members and embellishments, such as cluster columns, converging groins, flying buttresses, tracery tabernacles, crockets, finials, cusps, orbs, pinnacles, and spires grew by degrees out of the simple pointed arch, between the latter end of the twelfth and the early part of the fourteenth centuries. Secondly, that the pointed arch itself was discovered by observing the happy effect of these intersecting intersecting semicircular arches, with which the architects of the latter end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth centuries were accustomed to ornament all their principal ecclesiastical edifices: and thirdly, that we are chiefly indebted for both these discoveries, that is to say, both for the rise and the progress of pointed architecture, to our own ancestors, the Anglo-Normans and the English.' To this style of architecture, the application of the epithet 'Gothic' was either absurd or contumelious: if it implied a belief that the principles of it could be traced through our Saxon ancestors to their progenitors, the Goths, it was absurd; if it be meant to convey the idea of barbarism, as opposed to Greek or Roman, it was contumelious. But to proceed with Dr. Milner's statement. 'Not content with defending his former system, the author has gone a step beyond it in the present treatise. He has attempted to refute the common objection, that pointed architecture is destitute of orders, rules, and proportions. In opposition to this, he has maintained that there are three orders of the pointed style, as distinct from each other, as are the orders of Grecian architecture, having their respective members, ornaments, and proportions, though the essential and characteristi cal difference among them, consists in the degree of angle formed by the pointed arch. Hence he shews that there is hardly less barbarism in confounding these orders; as for example, by intermixing the obtuse angles of the third order with the acute angles of the first, in the manner that has sometimes been witnessed of late, than there was in uniting Grecian and pointed architecture together, as was so often done, one and two hundred years ago.' Such is the general principle of this excellent little work, to which we have nothing to object but the use of the word Order, which, in Dr. Milner's sense, is more extensive than in that of architects, who refer it to the column, capital, and entablature alone; whereas, in his application of the word, it includes the turn of the arch, besides embracing many subordinate marks and charac-' ters of each period: manner,' perhaps, or even ' æra' would have been more exact. In proceeding to Dr. Milner's accurate investigation of the three-pointed manners, a previous question arises, whence the origin of a more ancient style of church architecture in our island, which prevailed with no very characteristic change, from an early period in the Saxon times, to the middle of the twelfth century? That the Saxons brought nothing better from their native forests than the art of constructing huts and hovels, is now admitted. The specimens of Roman architecture, which yet remain in England, found as they are in their principal cities, lead to the irresistible conclusion that the British province contained little better; and of these the arches, though semicircular, and possessing a rug ged ged symmetry which is not unpleasing, have never had a moulding. One exception only to this general fact is within our recollection, namely, the remains of a temple at Bath, which, from its debased and inelegant style, must have been built in a late period of the lower empire. This, however, supposing it to have been entire, might have served for a model to the first Saxon artists; but standing, as far as we know, alone, like other exceptions it proves the general rule. Architecture, however, and indeed magnificent architecture, the Saxons of our island had in the seventh century. Whence then, to recur to our question, came the models, and the hands to execute them? Unquestionably from the common parent of religion and art-from Rome. This fact, with respect to Wilfred, his associates, and followers, Dr. Milner has proved. He has shewn too, by a clear and perspicuous deduction, and by drawings from very ancient paintings, what was the simple primeval church of Italy, and in what manner the first idea of a nave and side ailes arose from the practice of walling up the exterior porticos of the old basilicæ in order to conceal them from profane eyes. In the next place, from an interior view given by Dr. Milner of Old St. 'Peter's, at Rome, from another of St. Sophia, at Constantinople, exhibited by Du Cange, in his Familiæ Byzantine; and from a third of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, at Jerusalem, the prevailing style from the time of Constantine to the period in question appears to have been a depraved species of Doric, in which, contrary to the genius of that order, the columns were elongated out of all proportion. Admitting, however, these and other specimens of the same period in Italy, and perhaps in the eastern empire, to have been the first models of our Saxon architecture, we have still two difficulties, which we cannot solve to our own satisfaction. The first is this: admitting, as we have, that our first artists were brought from Italy, how comes it that the proportions of our first Saxon columns are the very reverse of those which are supposed to have been their models, so that the circumference not unfrequently exceeds the height of the shaft? Is it that these columns, being first used in crypts and undercrofts, were curtailed to that ungraceful proportion from necessity; and that when they were employed above the surface the same proportion was retained from want of taste? We are not quite satisfied with our own solution. Secondly; in the foreign specimens of the architecture of the middle ages, we see no very decisive symptom of the peculiar enrichments, the chevron mouldings, the eagles' sculls, basso relievos, &c. which the Saxons so much affected in their highly ornamented arches and door-ways. These, it is not impossible, may have been fantastic and degraded imitations of the chaste enrichments which belong to the pure |