does deserve some respect, seems to be sometimes studiously despised; prominences and relief, so necessary for chiaro-oscuro and artistic effects, are rigorously excluded; while immense plates of wall, mostly of brick, the poorest of materials, rise to a dizzy height above all surrounding buildings.
This rough and ready style of building is carried into the interior of even the most sacred edifices. Were our brickwork like that employed in the buildings of Nero's time, almost close-fitting as carved stone, without visible cement, uniform in shape and tender in colour, sharply moulded into every architectural member and ornament, and put into every comely disposition that can copy, without simulating, stone, one would be glad to see such an adaptation of a material, cheap, manageable, and everywhere at hand.
But I must own that as it is now sometimes em-
flowers are essentially homologous, side corresponding with side, but the entire tree seems to possess an instinct for symmetry: if pyramidal, throwing out its shoots equally all round, or otherwise giving roundness and equal mass to all parts of its head.
But it is in animals, and especially in His noblest work, that the Great Architect manifests a power which in man we might call ingenuity, in Him simple wisdom, of making the visible portion of His work perfectly symmetrical, while the interior of His structure is (with the exception of the head) completely devoid of that quality. Beginning with the heart, neither each organ in itself, nor the position of one to the other, bears any trace of symmetrical arrangement. This is the perfection of the rule, that the inward structure may be admirably complete without any symmetry, and with individual reference of each part to its own action and end; while outwardly that symmetry may be preserved without sacrifice of plan, but in natural harmony with those senses, which the head is built symmetrically, within as without, expressly to supply in accordance with that principle of external symmetry. Must not the most perfect of man's architectural works be that which assumes and acts upon this model of creative wisdom?