that portion of my work for a long period, from my eagerness and anxiety to present the historical part of it to my readers, it is inserted in this chapter, in which an extensive parallel is drawn between the sacred edifices of India and Egypt. In fact, of these pagodas, the most venerable for their antiquity, as, for instance, those of Deogur and Tanjore, engraved among the accurate and beautiful designs of Mr. Hodges, are erected in the form of stupendous pyramids, resembling huge caverns, and admitting the light of heaven at one solitary door; they are, however, within artificially illuminated by an infinite number of lamps, suspended aloft, and kept continually burning. The similitude which the internal appearance of some of these more ancient Indian temples bears, in point of gloomy solemnity, to the original excavated pagoda, so forcibly struck Mandelsloe, on his visit to this country in 1638, that he expressly asserts,

they looked more like caves and recesses of unclean spirits, than places designed for the exercise of their religion."*. As the Hindoos improved in architectural knowledge, the form of the pagoda gradually varied; the labours of art were exhausted, and the revenue of whole pro

See the Travels of J. Albert de Mandelsloe, translated by John Davies, and published at London in 1662.

vinces consumed, in adorning the temple of the Deity. In proof of this, may be adduced that passage which I have before quoted from the Ayeen Akbery, and which acquaints us that the entire revenues of Orissa, for twelve years, were expended in the erection of the TEMPLE TO THE SUN. The outside of the pagodas is in general covered all over with figures of Indian animals and deities, sculptured with great spirit and accuracy, while the lofty walls and cielings within are adorned with a rich profusion of gilding and paintings, representing the feats of the ancient Rajahs, the dreadful conflicts of the contending Dewtahs, and the various incarnations of the great tutelary god VEESHNU.

In regard to the great similitude which the earliest erected temples, both in India and Egypt, bore to ancient grove temples, it is strikingly evident and forcibly arrests attention in the arrangement of their columns, at regular and stated distances, forming vast aisles and gloomy avenues that extended all round the outside, as well as through the whole internal length of the edifice. It must be owned, however, that this style of building, with cir cular wings and long ranging avenves of columns, in the manner of the temples of Philaë and the serpent Cnuph, is more particularly

discernible in the temples of Egypt, where an infinity of pillars was necessary to support the ponderous stones, often thirty or forty feet in length, that formed the roofs of the stupendous structures of the Thebais. That similitude, likewise, irresistibly struck the beholder in the very form of those columns, of which the lofty taper shaft, as, in particular, those of Esnay, resembled the majestic stem of the cedar and palm, while their capitals expanded in a kind of foliage, representative of the compressed branches of the trees more usually deemed sacred. There is, in Pococke, a large plate of Egyptian columns, with their varied capitals: those capitals, in general, bulge out towards the centre, somewhat after the manner of the cushion that crowns the Indian column; and most of them are fluted or channeled in the manner of those in the Indian caverns and pagodas,

The Suryatic and Mithriac cavern, with its circular dome for the sculptured orbs, suspended aloft and imitative of those in the heavens, to revolve in, and the Zoroastrian worship of fire, conspired to give the Asiatic temples at once their lofty cupolas, and that pyramidal termination which they alternately assume, and which are often seen blended

together in different parts of the same edifice. Theirastronomical and physical theology stamped upon other shrines of the Deity sometimes the OVAL form, that is, the form of the MUNDANE EGG, the image of that world which his power made and governs; and on others again, as those of Benares and Mattra, the form of the St. Andrew's cross, at once symbolical of the four elements, and allusive to the four quarters of the world. But I will not, in this place, anticipate the observations that will occur hereafter in more regular order, and with more strict propriety.

I shall first describe some of the more celebrated Indian temples; I shall then direct the eye of the reader to the massy fanes of the Thebais; and the reflections, resulting from the survey of those of either country, will be detailed in the dissertation alluded to. The reader will please to observe, that I by no means intend or presume to give a general history of Oriental architecture: I shall restrain my observations to that of India, Egypt, and the early periods of the Greek and Roman empires, and shall principally consider in the detail their astronomical and mythological speculations.

I shall commence my description of the

temples of India with observing, from Tavernier, by whose account I shall principally guide myself throughout this survey, and whose assertions, upon inquiry, I find to be nearly right, that the existing pagodas of the greatest antiquity and celebrity, above those already instanced in all India, are the pagodas of JAGGERNAUT, BENARES, MATTRA, and TRIPETTY, to which I shall add, from private authority, the name of one which that traveller did not visit, that of SERINGHAM. I adopt Tavernier's account in preference to any other for two reasons; first, because his narration, so far as it relates to objects which he actually visited, has ever been deemed, of all Indian travellers, the most genuine and authentic; and, secondly, because he travelled through India before those dreadful devastations commenced, which the execrable spirit of bigotry that actuated the mind of the Indian emperor, Aurengzeb, urged him to commit on the ancient and hallowed shrines of India. This fierce Mohammedan, however renowned in the field of politics and war, tarnished all the glory obtained in that field by his intolerant zeal, and the remorseless fury with which he persecuted the benign religion and unoffending priests of Brahma. But for these unprovokad outrages, even the enor