Trampling the unshower'd grass with lowings loud: Within his sacred chest, Nought but profoundest hell can be his shroud: 7. High on his car Sesostris struck my view, This colossal statue of the celebrated Eastern tyrant is not very strongly imagined. As Phidias is said to have received his ideas of majesty in his famous Jupiter, from a passage in Homer, so it is to be wished, that our author's imagination had been inflamed and enlarged, by studying Milton's magnificent picture of Satan. The word hold, in the third line, is particularly feeble and flat. It is well known, that the Ægyptians, in all their productions of art, mistook the gigantic for the sublime, and greatness of bulk for greatness of manner. 8. Of * Milton's Poems, Vol. II. Page 30. Newton's Edit. Oct. + V. 113. 8. Of Gothic structure was the Northern side, "Those who have considered the theory of Architecture, (says a writer who had thoroughly studied it,) tell us the proportions of the three Grecian orders were taken from the Human Body, as the most beautiful and perfect production of nature. Hence were derived those graceful ideas of columns, which had a character of strength without clumsiness, and of delicacy without weakness. Those beautiful proportions were, I say, taken originally from nature, which, in her creatures, as hath been already observed, referreth to some use, end, or design. The Gonfiezza also, or swelling, and the diminution of a pillar, is it not in such proportion as to make it appear strong and light at the same time? In the same manner, must not the whole entablature, with its projections, be so proportioned, as to seem great, but not heavy; light, but not little; inasmuch as a deviation into either extreme, would thwart that reason and use of things, wherein 1 * V. 119. wherein their beauty is founded, and to which it is subordinate? The entablature, and all its parts and ornaments, architrave, freeze, cornice, triglyphs, metopes, modiglions, and the rest, have each an use, or appearance of use, in giving firmness and union to the building, in protecting it from the weather, in casting off the rain, in representing the ends of the beams with their intervals, the production of the rafters, and so forth. And if we consider the graceful angles in frontispieces, the spaces between the columns, or the ornaments of the capitals, shall we not find that their beauty ariseth from the appearance of use, or the imitation of natural things, whose beauty is originally founded on the same principle? Which is, indeed, the grand distinction between Grecian and Gothic architecture: the latter being fantastical, and for the most part founded neither in nature nor reason, in necessity nor use; the appearance of which accounts for all the beauties, graces, and ornaments of the other. "* * ALCIPHRON, Vol. I. Dial. III. 9. There 9. There sat Zamolxis with erected eyes, And Odin here in mimic trances dies. There on rude iron columns, smear'd with blood, SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE, always a pleasing, though not a solid writer, relates the following anecdote. "In discourse upon this subject, and confirmation of this opinion having been general among the Goths of those countries, Count Oxenstiern, the Swedish Ambassador, told me, there was still in Sweden, a place which was a memorial of it, and was called Odin's Hall: that it was a great bay in the sea, encompassed on three sides with steep and ragged rocks; and that in the time of the Gothic Paganism, men that were either sick of diseases they esteemed mortal or incurable, or else grown invalid with age, and thereby past all military action, and fearing to die meanly and basely, as they esteemed it, in their beds, they usually caused themselves to be brought to the nearest part of these VOL. I. A a * V. 123. these rocks, and from thence threw themselves down into the sea, hoping, by the boldness of such a violent death, to renew the pretence of admission into the Hall of Odin, which they had lost by failing to die in combat, and by arms."* In these beautiful verses we must admire the postures of Zamolxis and Odin, which exactly point out the characters of these famous legislators, and instructors, of the Northern nations. As expressive, and as much in character, are the figures of the old heroes, druids, and bards, which are represented as standing on iron pillars of barbarous workmanship: they remind one of that group of personages, which Virgil, a lover of antiquity, as every real poet must be, has judiciously placed before the palace of Latinus: Quinetiam veterum effigies ex ordine avorum, * Temple's Works, Vol. III. page 238. † Ver. 177. Æn. I. 7. Consider |