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72
Lectures on Fine Art.
[Lect.

the columns and other supports, the diameters and heights of those columns, the relation of length to breadth and altitude, in plan and elevation; the sizes of openings and the allotment of mass supporting to mass supported, so as to gratify statical as well as esthetic requirements.

By Eurythmia I believe was meant the study of the succession and grouping of parts. The minds of mathematicians like Euclid, his rivals and his pupils, would never have been satisfied unless the mysterious harmonies of nature had been duly represented in the theory of Grecian architecture. The earnest study by the Greeks of measure in music and metre, demonstrates their partiality for the refinements of time and rhythm; and for such temperaments their architecture, to be perfect, required a corresponding field of development. Hence arises that well understood division of parts in architecture, the harmonious gradation of which is testified to by the retention of certain terms common to architectural and musical science to the present day. Modulation as a system was, at once in architecture and in music, a method of uniting and levelling by gentle approximations all parts otherwise unequal or discordant, the only way of passing agreeably from one set of associations of idea in any shape to another.

It was these very exigencies of modulation which formed so important a branch of the study of Eurythmia, which induced the organisation by the Greeks of that subtle system of optical corrections which they carried to a far greater refinement than has ever been aimed at by any other people in the history of art: refinements which, I believe, if we could have still presented to us the masterpieces of Grecian painting, as we have of their architecture and their sculpture, we should find to have constituted a portion of their daily practice in every branch of the Fine Arts.

We find it in their technical arts, whether in the simplest form of the cheapest vase thrown on the potter's wheel or