your geometrical theorist, and observes that "the apartment is planned
precisely in the proportion of six to five." So it is, but it is only
the philosophy of the measuring-tape, after all. Secondly, it is a
question whether the value of this geometrical basis is so great as has
sometimes been argued, seeing that the results of it in most cases
cannot be judged by the eye. If, for instance, the room we are in were
nearly in the proportion of seven in length to five in width, I doubt
whether any of us here could tell by looking at it whether it were truly
so or not, or even, if it were a foot out one way or the other, in which
direction the excess lay; and if this be the case, the advantage of such
a geometrical basis must be rather imaginary than real.

[Illustration: Figs. 26 through 28]

Having spoken of plan as the basis of design, I should wish to conclude
this lecture by suggesting also, what has never to my knowledge been
prominently brought forward, that the plan itself, apart from any
consideration of what we may build up upon it, is actually a form of
artistic thought, of architectural poetry, so to speak. If we take three
such plans as those shown in Figs. 26, 27, and 28, typical forms
respectively of the Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic plans, we certainly can
distinguish a special imaginative feeling or tendency in each of them.
In the Egyptian, which I have called the type of "mystery," the plan
continually diminishes as we proceed inward. In the third great
compartment the columns are planted thick and close, so as to leave no
possibility of seeing through the building except along a single avenue
of columns at a time. The gloom and mystery of a deep forest are in it,
and the plan finally ends, still lessening as it goes, in the small and
presumably sacred compartment to which all this series of colonnaded
halls leads up. In the Greek plan there is neither climax nor