Thus we find so learned an art critic as Lord Balcarres remarking (_Donatello_, p. 21), “The massive and abiding art of Egypt ignored the personality of its gods and Pharaohs, distinguishing the various persons by dress, ornament, and attribute.” For the gods, this may pass, but when such a thing is said of the Pharaohs one can only say that it is simply the opposite of the truth. Is it possible that the author of such a statement had never seen, before he made it, such vivid impressions of personality as the great diorite Khafra, with its splendid dignity, or, at the opposite end of the scale, the Reisner Menkaura, the very embodiment of a bourgeois “Farmer George” royalty, doing his best to look as dignified as becomes the wearer of the double crown, and failing so absolutely? Here are two successive occupants of the Egyptian throne, whose personality, according to Lord Balcarres, should be ignored in Egyptian art, and yet the sharp discrimination of personality is just the thing that immediately strikes everyone who sees the two statues together. Lord Balcarres, however, is not the only sinner in this respect. “The emptiness of the Sphinx’s face,” says Mr. March Phillipps in his charming book, _The Works of Man_, “is a prevailing trait in all Egyptian sculpture. All Egyptian faces stare before them with the same blank regard which can be made to mean anything precisely because it means nothing.... The truth is, Egyptian sculpture is a sculpture barren of intellectual insight and intellectual interest.” Has the writer of this confident condemnation, one wonders, ever seen the granite Senusert III, either of the Cairo or of the British Museum, with the strong harsh features which express, if ever any work of the sculptor’s hands expressed, both the pride and the bitter weariness of power, or, to take a New Empire instance, the masterful Thothmes III of the Cairo Museum, the face of a daring soldier, if there ever was one, or the ugly capable face of Prince Mentuemhat, also at Cairo? Mentuemhat has no claims to personal beauty, and, one imagines, no illusions on that matter; but strong character has seldom been more admirably expressed than in this specimen of the art which, as we are told, is “barren of intellectual insight and intellectual interest.” The fact is, that both these criticisms, and many others similar to them, rest upon a fundamental misconception about Egyptian sculpture. It is quite obvious that both Lord Balcarres and Mr. March Phillipps, in making them, are founding upon the colossal pieces of Egyptian sculpture which are the prominent objects in the galleries of our Museums, and taking them as adequately representative of the art which they are criticising; and to do this is hopelessly to misconceive the actual position.