24).

[P.90]CHAPTER VI.

THE MOSQUE.

THEN the Byzantine Christians, after overthrowing the temples of Paganism, meditated re-building and re-modelling them, poverty of invention and artistic impotence reduced them to group the spoils in a heterogeneous mass.[FN#1] The sea-ports of Egypt and the plains and mountains of Syria abounding in pillars of granite, syenite and precious marbles, in Pharaonic, Grecian, and Roman statuary, and in all manner of structural ornaments, the architects were at no loss for material. Their Syncretism, the result of chance and precipitancy, of extravagance and incuriousness, fell under eyes too ignorant to be hurt by the hybrid irregularity: it was perpetuated in the so-called Saracenic style, a plagiarism from the Byzantine,[FN#2] and it was reiterated in the Gothic, an offshoot from the Saracenic.[FN#3] This fact accounts in the Gothic style for its manifold incongruities of architecture, and for the phenomenon,-not solely attributable to the buildings

[p.91]having been erected piecemeal,-of its most classic period being that of its greatest irregularity.

Such "architectural lawlessness," such disregard for symmetry,-the result, I believe, of an imperfect "amalgamation and enrichment,"-may doubtless be defended upon the grounds both of cause and of effect. Architecture is of the imitative arts, and Nature, the Myriomorphous, everywhere delighting in variety, appears to abhor nothing so much as perfect similarity and precise uniformity. To copy her exactly we must therefore seek that general analogy compatible with individual variety; in fact, we should avoid the over-display of order and regularity.

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