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whose history it is one of your greatest privileges here to make yourselves acquainted.

I can only refer you to the monuments they erected as proving that their ability as artists was no less remarkable than their ability as warriors, politicians, and philosophers.

The earliest of their temples appears to be that at Corinth, dating from about 560 b.c.—a simple Doric monument of remarkably striking form and proportions.

Their next temple in point of date, that at Egina, is more popularly known through the preservation at Munich of the extraordinarily interesting sculptures which adorned it. It belongs to the middle of the 6th century b.c., and was adorned with a portico of six columns of the Doric order. This order was characterized by the absence of a base to the columns, by a considerable difference between the upper and lower diameters of the shaft, by the spreading echinus of the bell of the capital, upon which rested a square blocking, supporting the architrave, which was plain, having above it the frieze, decorated only with the triglyphs, corresponding with the ends of the beams of the wooden structure from which its forms are said to have been derived, and the metopes, or square compartments, forming the interspaces between the triglyphs. Above all reigned the cornice, mainly rectangular in form, of bold salience, forming a basis, at the ends of the structure, for the sculpture which filled the tympanum, or flat vertical triangular space, enclosed by the sloping sides of the inclination of the two sides of the roof constituting the pediment.

In future lectures I may have occasion to allude in detail to the principles upon which the Athenians depended to a great extent for the magnificent effects produced by their greatest structure. I do not therefore propose to do more now in the way of allusion to special masterpieces of Grecian architecture that to call your attention to the fact, that in the Parthenon and the Propylæon (two of the most im-