should not be laid down with stone pavement. A spacious pavement of stone has of itself an excellent effect in combination with architecture. And the circulation of air would be greatly improved by the want of the paltry clumps of planting which are sometimes seen in confined localities. To avoid a blank appearance, however, as well as for the convenience of foot passengers crossing, it might be requisite in such paved places, that there should be something in the centre to break and make a principal point in the space. Whoever has visited the chief continental towns will recollect the number of unenclosed places of no great extent, which have almost all of them a statue, an obelisk, or a fountain in the centre. The occasional alleys of trees at Berlin, the Hague, Frankfort, Paris, &c., will also be remembered. As a substitute for something better, the large lamp in the space at the west end of Princes Street is well suited to that particular situation. A well-constructed fountain, in the Flemish or German style, with open stone basin, in the middle of the Grassmarket of Edinburgh, would be adapted to the site and very beneficial to the neighbourhood.

In one of the open spaces in Edinburgh, and not one of very great extent, St. Andrew's Square, there is already in the centre a piece of architecture of important character and of a known and classical type. For various reasons this would seem to be a situation peculiarly suited for the treatment just proposed, viz., that it should be converted into a stone-paved open place. The present enclosed ground, encircling the Melville column, with its parapet and railing neither handsome enough to be ornamental nor light enough to be unnoticed, is quite unworthy of the locality. The architecture of the adjoining buildings is becoming every day richer and more decorated, and the thoroughfare is one

of the principal in the town. Nor is the slope in the area of the square from south to north so great but that it might be corrected by a skilful management of the ground.

With these observations, which are mere suggestions, the matters imperfectly treated of in this paper must be left in the hands of the proprietors of houses and public bodies more immediately concerned.

TRANSACTIONS OF THE ARCHITECTURAL INSTITUTE OF SCOTLAND,

SESSION 1855-56.

No. VI.

ON

THE EGYPTIAN OBELISKS

NOW IN

ROME.

BY

ALEXANDER THOMSON, Esq.

BANCHORY.

[Read at a Meeting of the Institute in Edinburgh, held on 3rd March 1856.]

THE erection of masses of stone in commemoration of important events, or in honour of distinguished persons, is coeval with the first beginnings of civilization in almost every country-the first attempt to establish historical records.

We find incidental notices of such monuments at an early age in Scripture; and we have the monuments themselves, of great antiquity, still existing in many countries. as well as in our own, where they appear in the form of those sculptured stones, whose inscriptions will, we trust, soon be made to reveal the story of their erection.

It is a doubtful question, whether the stone set up, or the inscription engraven on the rock be the more ancient; probably for many ages they were contemporaneous, at least this appears to be the conclusion pointed out by the recent

progress of discovery, and they often mutually illustrate each other.

The object of this paper is to describe to the Institute one class of these monuments as now existing in Rome the Obelisks-monuments which never fail to attract the attention of even the most careless traveller.

They have features, and produce an effect wholly peculiar to themselves; and though they have stood in Rome from sixteen to eighteen centuries, they are still manifestly foreigners, having no natural connection with the scenes around them.

The Romans never displayed much original or natural genius for any department of the fine arts. Their whole mental history shows them to have been in these matters copyists and not inventors. Their dramatists copied or translated from the Greek. Their orators imitated Demosthenes and Æschines, and enforced the study of them, and not that of any Roman models, on those who wished to excel in the art of public speaking.

In Architecture also, to a large extent, they were mere servile imitators; their principal buildings, down to the age of the emperors, being close, but not perfect copies of Grecian models.

In regard to the "Fine Arts,” in the more restricted use of the term, they followed even a simpler plan than that of copying they carried off the objects themselves to adorn their capital. An early instance of this occurs on the taking of the Etruscan city of Volscinium (now Bolsena), from which two thousand statues are said to have been carried to Rome (in B.C. 265, a.r. 488), which are reported to have been the first seen in the city.

We may also fairly infer the low state of public taste at a later period, from the well-known story of the Consul

Mummius, the conqueror of Corinth (B. C. 146, a.r. 607), who so little valued the inestimable works of art with which Corinth abounded, that he sold the finest of them to the King of Pergamus; and on shipping the remainder to Rome, he exacted security from the ship captain to replace whatever pictures or statues might be lost or injured during

the voyage.

The Romans, in truth, appear to have had, for many centuries, only a general indiscriminating admiration of works of art, as ornamental, and nothing more, without entering into the spirit or appreciating the principles which gave them birth.

This is the more remarkable, because their predecessors, the Etruscans, had attained great excellence in sculpture and the fictile arts; and their productions were highly esteemed and carefully sought out under the emperors; but for several centuries succeeding their final subjection, their arts seem to have been wholly despised and forgotten by their conquerors.

The Romans were especially a fighting and governing people, and all their delight was in those pursuits which enabled them first to subdue and then to rule with advantage their acquired dominions. The whole vigour of Roman intellect was given to the arts of war and of government during the long period of the growth of their empire, and whatever attention was bestowed on other subjects was plainly held to be of very secondary importance.

It was far otherwise in Greece. There the fine arts grew with freedom; they arose from it, and were to a large extent its beautiful expression; while in Rome the arts flourished as liberty decayed. Architecture is the only branch which can be said to have been a national taste, and even what of it is strictly Roman came into existence after freedom