tainly not,-must be the answer. A man is still less justified in making an improvident marriage than an improvident bargain, because it is worse to have a family whom you cannot support than to contract a debt which you can with difficulty pay. But then, if Mr Cobbett admits this, he and Mr Malthus are agreed; for it is utterly untrue that Mr Malthus ever dreamt of any other voluntary checks to population, and no one who has read his works can fancy it. Nay, we think Mr Cobbett has gone a good deal further than Mr Malthus (though not at all further than is correctly true), in handling this subject; as where he says, that if a labouring man have more than four children, some of them ought to be doing something,' p. 57. Mr Malthus never carried his anxiety as to children further than the marriage contract. He seems to have thought (as will certainly, in most cases, happen), that the marriage once made, children must come as they may. But Mr Cobbett seems to go a good way beyond this degree of providence and moral restraint; otherwise, how is a labouring man to comply with the rule of having only four young children at once? If the husband and wife live together, the chances are, that they will have six or seven before any one is capable of helping in any way. Does he then mean that they ought not to live together? This may be very right; it may be a rigorous derivation, for any thing we know, from the principle, carried to the extremity of its application. But let it be remarked, that the inference is not made by Mr Malthus, nor is any thing like such a check ever contemplated by him.

Last of all, we do wish that Mr Cobbett would extend the usefulness of his books for the poor, by leaving out those flings at Methodists, to which we have already alluded-and which only tend to shut many a door against wholesome instruction, at which it would otherwise be sure of entering. We also differ with him wholly upon the utility of religious tracts distributed among the poor, always assuming, that these shall not be of the base or ludicrous kind, which some silly persons, and some designing ones, try to disseminate, and, making it one condition of our approval, that other mental nourishment shall be freely administered also. We are by no means so bigotted as to require, that he should tack portions of theological instruction to his Cottage Economy. But on his part we request a like concession; and entreat him to avoid the disputed matters, both on Education, Methodism, and Tracts, and send out his lessons without a clog, which must obstruct their course. We heartily join with him in a pursuit which we firmly believe is calculated to better the condition of the people, to raise their character, and to increase their weight in the country;-and we are truly desirous that so momentous a concern should experience no hinderance.

ART. VI. An Inquiry into the Principles of Beauty in Grecian Architecture; with an Historical View of the Rise and Progress of the Art in Greece. By GEORGE, EARL OF ABERDEEN, K. T. &c. London, Murray. 1822.

IT

T is observed by Madame de Staël, that Architecture is the only art which approaches, in its effects, to the works of Nature; and there are few, we believe, who have not at some period of their lives felt the truth of the observation. The cathedral of York, the dome of St Paul's, or the interior of St Peter's, are scarcely classed in our recollection with the glories of human creation; and the impression which they produce, is less akin to admiration of the talent of an artist, than to the awe and veneration which the traveller feels when he first enters the defiles of the Alps.

It has often been a matter of regret to persons of taste in this country, that an art, so magnificent in its monuments, and so powerful in its effect, has been so little the object of popular cultivation; nor is it perhaps easy to understand, how a people so much alive to the grand and the beautiful in the other departments of taste, should so long have remained insensible to the attractions of one of its most interesting branches. Many causes have, doubtless, conspired to produce this effect; but among these, the principal, we are persuaded, is to be found in the absence of any monuments of approved excellence to form the taste, and excite the admiration of the Public. And, in this respect, there is an important distinction, which is often overlooked, between architecture and the other departments of art or literature.

In poetry, painting, or sculpture, the great works of former times are in every body's hands; and the public taste has long ago been formed on the study of those remains of ancient genius, which still continue, notwithstanding the destruction of the people who gave them birth, to govern the imagination of succeeding ages. The poetry of Virgil, and the eloquence of Cicero, form the first objects to which the education of the young is directed; the designs of Raphael and Correggio have been multiplied, by the art of engraving, to almost as great an extent as the classical authors; and casts at least, of the Apollo and the Venus, are familiar to every person who has paid the smallest attention to the beauty of the human form. It is on the habitual study of these works that the public taste has been formed; and the facility of engraving and printing has extended our acquaintance with their excellences, almost as far as knowledge or education have extended in the world.

But with architecture, the case is widely different. Public edifices cannot be published and circulated with the same facility as an edition of Virgil, or a print of Claude Lorrain. To copy or restore such monuments, requires an expenditure of capital, and an exertion of skill, almost as great as their original construction. Nations must be far advanced in wealth and attainment before such costly undertakings can be attempted. And if the superstition of an earlier age has produced structures of astonishing magnitude and genius, they are of a kind which, however venerable or imposing, are not calculated to have the same effect in chastening the public taste, with those which arose in that auspicious period when all the finer powers of the mind had attained their highest exaltation. It thus unfortunately happens, that architecture cannot share in the progress which the other fine arts are continually making from the circulation and study of the works of antiquity; and successive nations are often obliged to begin anew the career which their predecessors have run, and fall inevitably into the errors which they had learned to avoid.

The possibility of multiplying drawings or engravings of the edifices of antiquity, or of informing distant nations of their proportions and dimensions, has but little tendency to obviate this disadvantage. Experience has shown, that the best drawings convey no sort of conception of architectural grandeur, or of the means by which it is produced. To those, indeed, who have seen the originals, such engravings are highly valuable, because they awaken and renew the impression which the edifices themselves have made; but to those who have not had this advantage, they speak an unknown language. This is matter of common observation; and there is no traveller who has returned from Greece or Italy, who will not confirm its truth. It is as impossible to convey a conception of the exterior of the Parthenon, or the interior of St Peter's, by the finest drawings accompanied by the most accurate statement of their dimensions, as to give the inhabitants of a level country, a true sense of the sublimity of the Alps, by exhibiting a drawing of the snowy peaks of Mont Blanc, and informing him of its altitude according to the latest trigonometrical observations.

Even if drawings could convey a conception of the original structures, the taste for this art is so extremely limited, that it could have but little effect in obviating the disadvantage of their remote situation. There is not one person in a hundred, who ever looks at a drawing, or if he does, is capable of deriving the smallest pleasure from the finest productions of that branch of art. To be reduced to turn over a portfolio of engravings,

is proverbially spoken of as the most wretched of all occupations in a drawing-room; and it is no uncommon thing to see the productions of Claude, or Poussin, or Williams, abounding in all the riches of architectural ornament, passed over without the slightest indication of emotion, by persons of acknowledged taste in other respects. And yet the same individuals, who are utterly insensible to architectural excellence in this form, could not avoid acquiring a certain taste for its beauties, if they were the subject of habitual observation, in edifices at home, or obtruded upon their attention in the course of foreign travelling.

Besides this, the architect is exposed to insurmountable difficulties, if the cultivation of those around him has not kept pace with his own, and if they are incapable of feeling the beauty of the edifices on which his taste has been formed. It is to no purpose that his own taste may have been improved by studying the ruins of Athens or Rome; unless the taste of his employers has undergone a similar amelioration, his genius will remain dormant, and his architectural drawings be suffered to lie in unnoticed obscurity in the recesses of his portfolio. The architect, it should always be remembered, cannot erect edifices as the poet writes verses, or the painter covers his canvass, without any external assistance. A great expenditure of capital is absolutely essential to the production of any considerable specimen of his art:-and therefore, unless he can communicate his own enthusiasm to the wealthy, and unless a growing desire for architectural embellishments is sufficient to overcome the inherent principle of parsimony, or the interested views of individuals, or the jealousy of public bodies, he will never have an opportunity of displaying his genius, or all his attempts will be thwarted by persons incapable of appreciating it. And unfortunately the talents of no artist, how great soever, can effect such a revolution; it can be brought about only by the continued observation of beautiful edifices, and the diffusion of a taste for the art, among all the well educated classes of the people.

The states of antiquity lay so immediately in the vicinity of each other, that the progress of architecture was uninterrupted; and thus people of each nation formed their taste by the study of the structures of those to whom they lay adjacent. The Athenians, in particular, in raising the beautiful edifices which have so long been the admiration of the world, proceeded entirely upon the model of the buildings by which they were surrounded, and the Temple of Jupiter Panthellenicus in the Island of Ægina, which is said to have been built by acus before

the Trojan War, remains to this day to testify the species of edifices on which their national taste was formed. The Ionic order, as its name denotes, arose in the wealthy regions of Asia Minor; and when the Athenians turned their attention to the embellishment of their city, they had, in their immediate vicinity, edifices capable of pointing out the excellences of that beautiful style. The Romans formed their taste upon the architecture of the people whom they had subdued, and adopted all their orders from the Grecian structures. Their early temples were exactly similar to those of their masters in the art of design; and when the national taste was formed upon that model, they combined them, as real genius will, into different forms, and left the Colyseum and the baths of Dioclesian as monuments of the grandeur and originality of their conceptions.

In modern times the restoration of taste first began around the edifices of antiquity. On the revival of the art in Italy, says Lord Aberdeen, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the great architects who adorned that country naturally looked for instruction to the monuments with which they ' were surrounded,-the wrecks and fragments of Imperial Rome. These were not only successfully imitated, but some⚫ times even surpassed by the Italian artists; for Bramanti and Michael Angelo, Palladio and Bernini, designed and executed • works which, although of unequal merit, may fairly challenge a comparison with the boasted productions of the Augustan " age. Italy and France, accordingly, have reaped the full advantage of their local proximity to the monuments of former genius; and the character of their buildings evinces a decided superiority to the works of architects in other states.

In the south of Europe, therefore, the progress of architecture has been uninterrupted, and each successive age has reaped the full benefit which the works of those which preceded it was fitted to confer. But the remoteness of their situation has deprived the inhabitants of the north of Europe of this advantage; and, while the revival of letters and the arts has developed the taste of the people of this country, in other respects, to a very great degree, their knowledge of architecture is yet in its infancy. In this city the most remarkable proofs of this deficiency. were annually exhibited till a very recent period. The same age which was illustrated by the genius of Sir Walter Scott, and Campbell, and Dugald Stewart, witnessed the erection of Nelson's Monument and St George's Church.

The extraordinary improvement in the public taste, which has taken place since the peace of 1814 opened the Continent to so large a proportion of our population, evinces, in the most