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GREEK ORNAMENT.
almost universal, and that the land was overflowing with artists, whose hands
and minds were so trained
as to enable them to execute these beautiful ornaments with unerring truth.
Greek ornament was wanting, however, in one of the great charms which should
always accompany
ornament,-viz. Symbolism.     It was meaningless, purely decorative, never
representative, and can
hardly be said to be constructive; for the various members of a Greek monument
rather present
surfaces exquisitely designed to receive ornament, which they did, at first,
painted, and in later times
both carved and painted. The ornament was DO part of the construction, as
with the Egyptian: it
could be removed, and the structure remained unchanged.  On the Corinthian
capital the ornament is
applied, not constructed: it is not so on the Egyptian capital; there we
feel the whole capital is the
ornament,-to remove any portion of it would destroy it.
However much we admire the extreme and almost divine perfection of the Greek
monumental
sculpture, in its application the Greeks frequently went beyond the legitimate
bounds of ornament.
The frieze of the Parthenon was placed so far from the eye that it became
a diagram: the beauties
which so astonish us when seen near the eye could only have been valuable
so far as they evidenced
the artist-worship which cared not that the eye saw the perfection of the
work if conscious that it was
to be found there; but we are bound to consider this an abuse of means, and
that the Greeks were
in this respect inferior to the Egyptians, whose system of incavo relievo
for monumental sculpture
appears to us the more perfect.
The examples of representative ornament are very few, with the exception
of the wave ornament
and the fret used to distinguish water from land in their pictures, and some
conventional renderings
of trees, as at No. 12, Plate XXI., we have little that can deserve this
appellation; but of decorative
ornament the Greek and Etruscan vases supply us with abundant materials;
and as the painted
ornaments of the Temples which have as yet been discovered in no way differ
from them, we have
little doubt that we are acquainted with Greek ornament in all its phases.
   Like the Egyptian
the types are few, but the conventional rendering is much further removed
from    the types.   In
the well-known honeysuckle ornament it is difficult to recognise   any attempt
at imitation, but
rather an appreciation of the principle on which the flower grows; and, indeed,
on examining
the paintings on the vases, we are rather tempted to believe that the various
forms of the leaves
of a Greek flower have been generated by the brush of the painter,
according  as the hand   is turned  upwards or downwards in the
formation of the leaf would the character be given, and it is more
likely that the slight resemblance to the honeysuckle may have been
an after recognition than that the natural flower should have ever
served as the model.  In Plate XCIX. will be found a representation
of the honeysuckle; and how faint indeed is the resemblance!   What is evident
is, that the Greeks
in their ornament were close observers of nature, and although they did not
copy, or attempt to
imitate, they worked on the same principles. The three great laws which we
find everywhere in
nature-radiation from the parent stem, proportionate distribution of the
areas, and the tangential
curvature of the lines-are always obeyed, and it is the unerring perfection
with which they are,
in the most humble works as in the highest, which excites our astonishment,
and which is only
fully realised on attempting to reproduce Greek ornament, so rarely done
with suceess.    A very
characteristic feature of Greek ornament, continued by the Romans, but abandoned
during the
Byzantine period, is, that the various parts of a scroll grow out of each
other in a continuous line,
as the ornament from the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates.
In the Byzantine, the Arabian Moresque, and Early English styles, the flowers
flow off on
either side from  a continuous line.   We have here an instance how     
slight a change in any
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