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When I see the hundreds and thousands of pounds that are annually expended in London, in the providing expensive suppers, in the procuring of exotic fruits and rare wines, whose consumption affords neither health to the body nor refreshment to the soul, how greatly do I regret that our wealthy nobles, who have so much money to throw away in useless luxury, do not possess somewhat of the public spirit, and the magnificent taste that formerly distinguished the wealthy Athenians, do not take delight in rearing stupendous edifices and noble works of art, rather than in giving expensive suppers. What would the pastrycooks, the gardeners, the jelly-makers, and the winemerchants do? it would be asked. Why we should certainly have so many the less of that description of people, which would be no injury to the country, and we should have more architects, more stonemasons, and more individuals employed in public works, whose labours would leave a durable value behind them-something tangible which we could see and admire.

The capital of individuals, and the whole capital of the country, must be employed in the encouragement and support of industry; but it is the description of industry called forth that marks the judgment employed in expenditure. Look at

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Athens, the whole of whose territory was not half the size of the smallest of our English counties, and the whole of whose annual income never equalled the annual rental of one of our large towns, yet she succeeded in raising buildings which, for taste, costliness, and magnificence, have never in modern times been equalled in this great and wealthy country of Britain.

The traveller who has wandered through Italy, will be astonished at the vast and magnificent palaces erected near five centuries ago at Genoa and at Venice, at Florence and at Rome, during the period when the progress of industry had produced and enriched the Italian republics, and when the mechanic labours were refined into the arts of elegance and of genius. The grand and massive palaces of Florence, with the bronze flagstaff rings to which the banners of her lordly chieftains were attached, still exist, and the strong and spacious palaces of the Roman and Venetian nobles still house their degenerate descendants. The nobles have become impoverished, but the result of the labour thus judiciously employed by their richer forefathers, when they had money to spend, still remains, and lordly structures with their solid walls of strength still exist unrepaired and yet undilapidated.

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If their noble ancestors had possessed the same tastes as our wealthy aristocracy, and wealthy commoners;-if they had employed the money they had acquired during that flourishing period of Italian agriculture, and Italian commerce, in providing expensive suppers and lordly entertainments, in calling into existence the labours of jellymakers, and supper providers, rather than those of the architect and the stone-mason, the consumed produce of such injudicious expenditure would no longer exist to attract our attention.

The pyramids, the wonders of ancient days, still tower above the plains of Egypt, and overlook the floods of the Nile; a hundred generations, like the leaves of autumn, have dropped into the grave; the Pharaohs, the Ptolemies, the Cæsars, and the Kaliphs are no more; but these noble monuments of the art and industry of man, still attract the wonder and admiration of the traveller, and carry him back in the consideration of their history, till he is lost in the boundless annals of time.

But, alas, we have few monuments now erected in England that will long survive those who construct them; we live only for the present moment, and catch at the fleeting pleasures and excitements of the passing day. Our forefathers, who had much less money to spend, possessed a public

spirit which looked beyond the enjoyment of the moment, and they cheerfully contributed, out of their small stock of property, to the erection of architectural monuments, which would be completed for the benefit and admiration of posterity, and which that degenerate posterity have allowed to moulder away and to perish from off the land, grudging the money to repair that which their ancestors grudged not the money to erect.

If an individual in England was to go round to the public, with an open bag, and ask them to contribute some portion of their abundant property towards the erection of a great national monument, he would be received with a smile of astonishment. Of what use will a public building be to me? would be the reply. Get you gone; I have got my horses, my dogs, and my hounds to support: dozens of coats which I have ordered from my tailor's, and never intend to put upon my back, to pay for; there are the expenses of my wife's routs, suppers, and balls ;-my racing bets, and my losses at cards, to be satisfied; and how can you be so foolish as to suppose that I have money to expend in the erection of public buildings ?

But, how different was the feeling in antient Athens. There every individual citizen felt an

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interest and a property in the public monuments; they crowded to admire them,-they lauded the public spirit of those who promoted their construction, they received them with the greatest honours, and pronounced them the benefactors of their country.

We have no taste whatever for architecture in England; and why? Because we are perfectly uneducated in the art, are made the prey of jobbing architects, who corrupt the pure originals of the antients, and palm upon us their own conceited vanities. We admire the gewgaw things that are stuck about our squares and streets, unsightly porches and detached masses of Grecian architecture, which were never intended for the places they are made to occupy, because we have seen nothing grander, and have had no opportunity of judging of their real merits by comparison.

There is the Parthenon, which has been admired in all ages as a masterpiece of architecture. How is it that the British nation have not had spirit enough to send over architects to take its exact proportions, and minutely to examine every part of it in detail, for the purpose of constructing a precisely similar building. Not merely a building of the same shape and height, the same breadth and length, but one possessing the superb frieze