tinued idolaters, they did not dare to give their churches an air of grandeur, lest the jealousy of the infidels should raise a new storm against them. It seems therefore probable, that the spacious and rich churches mentioned by Eusebius and Nicephorus, were only spacious and rich in comparison of the caverns and dens, in which the Christians assembled in times of actual persecution; of these there are not now the least remains, but perhaps it is easy to form a just idea of them, by considering what the churches were, which were erected when Christianity was first the established religion, when its patrons were the lords of the world, and its professors might safely hold the power of idolaters in defiance. Of these there are several now extant; some that were built in the reign of Constantine, and others from the time of his children and successors till the total ruin of the empire.

We must therefore date our inquiry into the form of the architecture and decorations of the churches of the west from the reign of Constantine. This prince, after his conversion, did not content himself with repairing the churches which had been built already, but he signalized his zeal by many monuments of the triumph of that religion which he had adopted. He might indeed have devoted to the service of Christianity some of the finest temples of Pagan superstition, and posterity would then not only have commended his piety, but admired his taste. He thought, perhaps, that the Pagan temples had been too much prophaned by idolatry to receive the pure Worshippers of Christ; he might think them too small, or he might not chuse to give his heathen subjects offence; however, for these, or some other reasons, he chose rather to build new structures than change the use of the old; and, therefore, he gave his own palace of Latran, at Mount Cælius, to supply materials for building a Christian Church. Soon after which he built that of St. Peter, at sunt Vatican, and another in the Ostian way, dedicated to St. Paul. All these were built upon the same plan, and that of St. Paul still preserves its original form, called the Basilick, because it was the same with that of certain large buildings adjacent to royal palaces, where sovereign princes administered justice to their people. Some other buildings, called also from their figure Basilicks, were used as a kind of exchange for merchants to negociate their business in the time of this emperor. A Basilick was a pile of building twice as long as it was wide, and terminated at one of its extremities by a hemicycle; two orders of coluinns placed one upon another reached the whole length

of the building within, and formed one grand walk in the middle, between one row of columns and the other, and two narrower walks, one between each row of columns and the wall. To the extremity terminated by the hemicycle, there was sometimes added a branch, or arm, reaching from one side to the other, and giving the whole building the form of a T. This form of building was preferred by Constantine, probably because it was roomy, solemn, majestic, and expressed the figure of the cross. St. Paul's, however, though in its original state, does by no means give us a just idea of the Basilicks of antiquity from which it was copied for its want of proportion, and the bad taste of its ornaments, sufficiently shew that architecture was greatly degenerated, even in the time of Constantine. The nave is adorned with four rows of columns, twenty in each row, which divide it into five walks, each column being one block of marble, except a very few; of the forty that form the middle walk, twenty-four are said to have been brought from the tomb of Hadrian: they are about three feet in diameter, of the Corinthian order, fluted; the marble is veined with blue, and there is nothing of the kind among all the remains of antiquity that exceeds them, either in workmanship or materials; the other sixteen are of a greyish white, and are the most clumsy and heavy imaginable; scarcely any two of them are the same in all their proportions, and there is not one in which the lines of the futing are straight, or the hollow cleanly cut out, and of an equal depth. It appears, at the first glance, that the carver worked merely by his eye, without any principle to direct him, and, at every stroke of his chisel looked with a scrupulous perplexity at his model, supposing that he had not ill imitated it, when he had chipped the shaft into grooves from the capital to the base. The other forty columns are of granite, and are much less; the surface may be said to be smooth, as a distinction from being fluted, but, in every other sense, it is rough and irregular.-In the two branches of the transverse part of the building, at the end which forms the top of the T, there are many columns of different kinds of marble, some red, some grey, and some of a dirty white, not answering to each other in any kind of symmetry.

The good Greek and Roman architects always gave their columns an entablature: but the architects of Constantine not thinking that necessary, the columns of St. Paul's nave are without it. Over the columns there is a wall carried up more than thirty feet, which supplies the place of the

second order of columns used in the Basilicks of the Ro mans; the two branches of the cross only have a ceiling; the nave is only covered with a sloping roof, of which the naked timbers are seen from below. Upon this occasion, it may be remarked, that none of the first Roman churches were vaulted, for among all that remain there is not one with such a roof to be found, and in those which have ceilings, the ceiling appears manifestly to have been added in later times; for it was not common, even in the 16th century, for any part of the church to be ceiled but the chancel. This defect might have been imputed to the timid ignorance of the builders, if it was not certain that those who vaulted the baths of Constantine, might, if they had thought fit, have vaulted a church; and it might have been imputed to a servile imitation of the Pagan Basilicks, if we had not been told by Vitruvius, that some of them were covered with vaulted roofs. As to the front of the Basilick of St. Paul, there is a modern portico about 20 feet high, and the rest is a brick wall, having on the point at top a Greek cross, decorated with some rude Mosaic. To this general description many particulars may be added, which will shew in a still stronger light the stupidity and ill taste of the time; some of the columns have no base at all; others are all base, being one great square block; in one place a column of the Corinthian order is placed opposite to one of the Composite; in another the Tuscan is contrasted with the Ionic, yet the whole appears to have been the painful effort of long labour, and unremitted diligence; nor must it be forgotten that the 24 columns, which were already exquisitely finished, are, by an ingenious contrivance, made to share in the general impropriety, for, instead of being equally divided in opposite rows, thirteen of them are placed on one side, and eleven on the other.

Thus it appears, that all which the magnificence of Constantine, who erected the edifice, and of Theodosius, who added some ornaments, could effect, was to raise a vast structure, and to decorate it with the spoils of those buildings that had been erected when the arts were in their perfection. After the persecutions against Christianity had entirely ceased, more churches abounded at Rome than at any other place; they were erected over the tombs of martyrs, and even formed out of the houses, which they had inhabited; little obscure oratories were enlarged into public temples, and the edicts that were published from the time of Constantine to that of Theodosius, for the destruction of Pagan temples, furnished the pious founders with

spoils of inestimable value, of which, however, they made a very bad use; for the plan of Constantine's Basilicks was universally followed, whether the church to be built was little or great, except that sometimes the building at the end, which gave the whole the figure of the cross, was omitted: they are all filled with columns, taken from adjacent buildings, and set up without the least regard to their height or their diameter, to the kind of marble, the order, or the decorations by which they are distinguished; from those which were too long the base is taken away, and to those that were too short a supplemental base was added, so that some columns in the same row have two bases, and some have none. Entablatures were quite out of fashion, and neither frize nor moulding of the cornice was to be attempted: such are all the churches that are at this time to be found in Rome, except two or three rotundas, and those which have beer. erected or modernised since the revival of the arts. Such are the principal productions of twelve successive ages, and when they are beheld and considered it is easy to make a just estimation of the magnificence which has been attributed to them by the authors of the lives of the popes, such as Anastasius, the library keeper, Platina, and some others. There are, however, seven or eight ancient buildings that have been converted into Christian churches, but they are neither great nor beautiful, the Pantheon excepted; and so diligent were the saints, in the first ardour of their zeal, to fulfil the edicts of the emperor, for the abolition of Pagan ingenuity, that of 2000 temples, which were standing within the walls of Rome, in the meridian of her glory, these are all that remain. The temple of Faustina serves at this hour for a chapel to a religious house, and the temple of Remus is become a kind of vestibule to a conventual church.

1759, July and Aug.

XLV. Description of the first Theatre at Athens.

ANCIENT authors have treated of the construction of theatres but obscurely and imperfectly. Vitruvius has given us no account either of their dimensions, or of the number of their principal and constituting parts; presuming, I suppose, that they had been well enough known, or could never have

perished; for example, he does not determine the dimen sions of the rows of benches. Among the more modern writers, the learned Scaliger has omitted the most essential parts; and the citations of Bulingerus from Athenæus, Hesychius, Eustathius, Suidas, and others, throw but a weak and imperfect light on the real construction of ancient theatres.

An exact description of the theatre of Bacchus in Athens, whose circumference is still visible, and whose ruins are a monument of its ancient magnificence, will give us a true idea of these structures. The famous architect Philos built this theatre in the time of Pericles, above two thousand years ago: it consisted without of three rows of porticos or galleries, one above the other, and was of a circular form; the diameter was one hundred Athenian feet, nearly the same in English measure, for which reason it was called by the Athenians, Hecatompedon. A part of the area, which comprehended fourteen feet of the diameter, did not belong precisely to the theatre, being behind the scene.

The theatre itself was divided into two principal parcitions, one for the spectators, and the other for the representations. The parts designed for the spectators were the conistra, which the Romans call arena: the rows or benches, the little stairs, and the gallery called circys. The parts appropriated to the actors were the orchestra, the logeon, or thymele, the proscenion and the scene. In that part of the edifice allotted to the spectators were twenty-four rows of seats, or benches, ascending gradually one above the other, and proceeding round the conistra or arena, in an arch of a circle, to the stage, which the Greeks called proscenion. These benches were distinguished eight and eight, by three corridors, or passages, which were called diazoma. They were of the same figure with the rows of seats, and were contrived for the passage of the spectators from one story to another, without incommoding those who were already placed. For the same convenience there were stairs that passed from one corridor to another across the several rows; and near those stairs there were doors, by which the people entered from the galleries on the outside, and took their places according to their rank and distinction. The best places were in the middle division, containing eight rows of seats, between the eighth and seventeenth this division was called bouleuticon, and designed for the magistrates: the other rows were called ephebicon, and were for the citizens, after they were eighteen years of age.

The height of each of these rows of benches was about