ing only on stone piers, it would necessarily have possessed much less architectural beauty than this, or indeed than many others.

The bridges and aqueducts of the Romans richly deserve the attention of the architect, not only because they are in fact the only works which the Romans, either from taste or from social position, were enabled to carry out without affectation, and with all their originality and power, but also because it was in building these works that the Romans acquired that constructive skill and largeness of proportion which enabled them to design and carry out works of such vast dimensions, to vault such spaces, and to give to their buildings generally that size and impress of power which form their chief and frequently their only merit. It was this too that enabled them to originate that new style of vaulted buildings which at one period of the Middle Ages promised to reach a degree of perfection to which no architecture of the world has ever attained. The Gothic style, it is true, perished at a time when it was very far from completed; but it is a point of no small interest to know where and under what circumstances it was invented. Strangely enough, it failed solely because of the revival and the pernicious influence of that very parent style to which it owed its birth, and the growth and maturity of which we have just been describing. It was the grandeur of the edifices reared at Rome in the first centuries of the Empire which so impressed the architects of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries that they abandoned their own beau

tiful style to imitate that of the Romans, but with an incongruity which seems inevitably to result from all imitations, as contrasted with true creations, in architectural art.

OF

THE COLUMN OF TRAJAN

EDWARD HUTTON

F the many Fora, which under the Empire sprang up in the neighbourhood of the Forum Romanum, the Forum Pacis of Vespasian, that lay close to the Basilica of Constantine behind the Basilica Æmilia, the Forum Nervæ that joined it on the west and led again into the Forum Augusti, which in its turn led under a Triumphal Arch into the Forum Trajani, only the last and most splendid of all remains to us in those few ruins which serve to remind us of the Greek architect Apollodorus who built here with so much magnificence the Basilica Ulpia, the two libraries, the Temple Divi Trajani, the Triumphal Arch, the two hemicycles and the Column which occupied or surrounded the Forum of Trajan. Of all these great and splendid things but one has come down to us practically intact-the Column in which, closed in a golden urn, the ashes of the Emperor were destined to lie till Alaric and his Goths spoiled it of its treasure.

It was, it seems, a Greek custom to set up sometimes a single column as a memorial to some great or noble personage or in commemoration of a victory. In erecting the Columna Rostrata in the Forum Romanum adorned with the beaks of ships, in memory of the naval victory of Duilius

over the Carthaginians in 261 B. C., the Romans, after all, were but following a precedent. It was thus nothing new that Trajan did when, in 113 A. D., he erected, in the midst of the Forum he had built, a column to commemorate his Dacian victories. The astonishment lay doubtless in the continuous episode and in the magnificence of the work rather than in the memorial itself. For the shaft standing on the tomb of the Emperor, a four-sided pediment, adorned with trophies of war, rises a hundred and twenty-four feet in the air. Tapering very slightly it has a diameter of ten feet at the base, while within a spiral staircase of a hundred and eighty-five steps leads to the summit where stood the gilded statue of Trajan, which in 1587 was replaced by a bronze figure of St. Peter. The shaft itself, formed of twenty-three drums of marble, is covered with a series of reliefs three feet and three inches high, a great procession of two thousand five hundred figures, animals and engines of war, mounting, as it were, on a winding way twentythree times round the column to the top, to the very feet of the Emperor who stood there. And what is so surpris

this, perhaps the most

ing, so astonishing and new in beautiful of all Roman works that have come down to us, is just that continuous episode, the whole campaign told us in chapter after chapter realistically, as an historian might tell it, with a sincere insistence upon just facts, on the natural difficulties of that German country, of the crossing of the great river, and yet with a marvellous idealism, an idealism of form, at any rate, so that it is by