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The subject of our present Lecture is, I may remind you, the Theory of Architecture.

You may possibly remember that I have already taken pains to explain to you that while painting and sculpture were arts which found their basis in direct imitation, Architecture is one in which imitation enters only as quite a secondary and ornamental ingredient; and although a valuable adjunct the groundwork of the art is to be found in other elements of causation.

Many writers have almost rashly described as simple the fundamental bases of Architecture. My impression is that they are exceedingly complex, and hardly to be arrived at by any synthetical statement, it being an art which in its perfect form so interlinks itself with its sister arts, that it is scarcely, until some knowledge of the principles of those sister arts is acquired, that the student can at all safely reason upon the constitution of that art which is, as it were, the mother of all others.

This forms only the natural converse of the proposition "that it is impossible to predicate safely concerning the Fine Arts, as a family, without knowing the nature of all its constituent members," the character of which is also modified by