If the retaining of useless entablatures after their office was superseded by the arch, was a falsehood and a hindrance necessary to be swept away before any progress could be effected, have we not a perfect parallel in the retaining of useless buttresses after their duty has been superseded by the tie?

There is, among other art-destroying fallacies, a notion now prevalent, that architectural styles spring up of themselves, and that if we wait long enough, in process of time a new one may grow up, we know not how. A new railway is more likely to grow up. Decorative manners, fashions, are not to be confounded with a new style, still less with a new system, such as THE TWO, the only two, that possess constructive and decorative unity. Yet even a new fashion does not come unsought,—without search after novelty. Far less can an architectural system arise but by an earnest and rightly directed search after TRUTH. For five thousand years have all the nations beyond the radius of Greek influence sought a true system of beam architecture, and never found it. For fifteen centuries did Europeans use the arch, and seek a system of arch architecture, before they found it. For a much longer time have Arabs, Turks, Chinese, sought the same, and never attained it. For twenty centuries did the Italians practise mixed construction, and seek a system thereof, before they attained it. Let us not deceive ourselves : a style never grew of itself; it never will. It must be sought, and sought the right way. We may blunder on in a wrong path forever, and get no nearer the goal.

A new style requires the generalized imitation of nature and of many previous styles; and a new system requires, in addition to this (as Professor Whewell has remarked), the binding of all together by a new principle of unity, clearly understood, agreed upon, and kept constantly in view. Constructive statics affords three such principles,-the DEPRESSILE, the COMPRESSILE, and the TENSILE methods,-the beam-the arch—the truss; of which the two former have been made

the bases of past systems: the third is ours, to be used in the same manner.

Such I believe to be the problem Truth propounds to the architects of the present time; but its solution will be found utterly hopeless, as long as we indulge any hankering after novelty for its own sake; any mean disposition to follow instead of correcting popular taste; and above all, let none dare attempt it till we have engraved on our compasses a hacknied sentence, but one which I suspect to contain nearly the whole theory of art,-SEEK NOT TO SEEM WHAT YOU

WOULD BE, BUT TO BE WHAT YOU WOULD SEEM.

ANCIENT MONUMENTS OF GREECE.

EVERY one can understand the regret with which we behold the remains of ancient grandeur, and the capitals of buried empires. This feeling, so profound in Jerusalem and Rome, is even more so in Athens,—

"the eye of Greece, mother of arts And eloquence, native to famous wits, Or hospitable-"

a city never so large as New York, but whose inhabitants produced within the short space of two centuries, reckoning from the battle of Marathon, as Landor says, a larger number of exquisite models, in war, philosophy, patriotism, oratory, and poetry-in the semi-mechanical arts which accompany or follow them, sculpture and painting-and in the first of the mechanical, architecture, than the remainder of Europe in six thousand years.

The monuments of antiquity which still exist in Athens have been described by Chandler, Clarke, Gell, Stuart, Dodwell, Leake, and other travellers, the most recent and competent of whom perhaps is Mr. Henry Cook, of London, author of Illustrations of a Tour in the Ionian Islands, Greece, and Constantinople, who has just made for the Art-Journal a series of drawings of those which are most important, representing them in their present condition. These drawings by Mr. Cook, we have partially reproduced in the present volume, making liberal use at the same time of his descriptions.

Until the sacrilegious hand of the late Lord Elgin despoiled Athens of "what Goth, and Turk, and Time had spared," the world could still see enough to render possible a just