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with the highest beauty; and proving the power of the two, so combined, to imprint upon the mind of the spectator the strongest impressions of sublimity which it is in the power of any of the arts to produce.
At a first glance the peculiar alliance of architecture with, and reliance upon, reason,—together with its strictly technical necessities,—would seem to remove it from that realm of beauty over which we may imagine our sense of the ideal the only legitimate ruler. There would seem to be something incompatible between lofty thought and the indispensable ministration of architecture, through the labours of many uncultivated workmen to some of man's first necessities. This was well felt and the concurrent difficulty was admirably solved by the late Cardinal Wiseman, whose powers of exposition on matters of art were as rare and great as his taste for and knowledge of the subject. "It may," he says, "seem superfluous to observe in writing of architecture that it obviously divides itself into two branches; the purely artistic, and the constructive, or scientific. If, on the one side, it seems to descend towards the class of mechanical pursuits, on the other it rises so high as to command its other two sisters, and to be almost necessary for their perfect existence. I have sufficiently intimated that one great difference between ancient and modern art, including mediæval art under the first division, consists in this,—that ancient art was public, and modern is private. Galleries of sculpture were anciently unknown. Its most matchless pieces were in temples, or in public halls, such as those of baths, or in open gardens, perhaps adorning fountains, but generally accessible to the most plebeian eye; but this very circumstance shows how architecture is in the highest sense a Fine Art, and must always necessarily grow, as such, commensurately with the advancement of the other two branches of the art of design."
So long as architecture ministered only in an incomplete form to the selfish wants of individual man, an almost perfect