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portant structures which crown the Acropolis of Athens) the utmost perfection of human architectural skill appears to have been attained.

I cannot however leave the subject of Grecian architecture, even in this hasty sketch, without drawing your attention to the fervour with which Architecture was venerated, and indeed art generally, by the Greeks, in the persons of the leading artists of all kinds. Amongst them we first meet with systems of philosophy, in the scheme and scope of which art is dignified by an admission of its social and national importance, and by a recognition of its dependence for perfection upon laws, based upon science, to be eliminated only by time, patient observation, and the persistent exercise of some of the highest powers of human reason.

It is not until we reach the group of monuments executed by the Hellenic races of high intellectual power that we meet with a consistent pursuit of abstract beauty for its own sake. They perseveringly elevated themselves to a really philosophical analysis of the phenomena and wonders of the vast field of nature and study offered to man's reason by Divine ordination.

When the Greeks elaborated a theogony ascribing to their deities qualities, not of barbaric power only, but of the highest wisdom and noblest virtues, it was but natural that in the structures which served as shrines to their symbolic representations of those deities, they should bring to bear upon the elaboration of those temples a reflex from the qualities they venerated in their gods. The massive strength of Hercules, the breadth, simplicity and power of Zeus, the wisdom and rectitude of Athenæ, and the pure beauty of the Uranian Venus, all found echoes in the masterpieces which still make the soil of Greece hallowed ground to the architect.

It is not here now that I can attempt to dwell upon those refinements of proportion, and exquisite delicacy of mathematical correction of optical aberrations, which have been so