Every restoration is inspired by a more or less blind and superstitious reverence for the past. This has often been asserted in connection with politics and religion, and the assertion is equally true in respect to art. Each of those dynasties to which Egypt owed its political restoration, set themselves to repair the temples which had been destroyed, and to replace upon their pedestals the statues of gods or ancestors which had been overthrown. When new temples and new statues were to be erected, the first idea of the artists employed was to study the ancient monuments and to try to equal them. As long as Egypt preserved her vitality, the wants of the present and external influences no doubt had their effect in introducing certain changes, both in the arrangement of her buildings, and in the modelling, movement, and expression of the statues which adorned them. Ancient types were not servilely copied, but the temptation to borrow from them a point of departure, at least, for new attempts at progression, was too strong to be resisted. It was necessary that all buildings and statues should be in harmony with the remains which subsisted from previous ages, and from this it resulted that each new creative effort began by imitating what had gone before. The 'school' in process of foundation accepted on trust the architectural disposition left by its predecessor, as well as its methods of looking at nature. And this is equivalent to saying that, from its first moment, it must have been conventional in a certain degree. This conventionality must have increased at every fresh renascence, because each new development had its own processes to transmit to posterity as well as those of its ancestors. After each recoil or pause in the progress of art, the weight of the past must have seemed heavier to those who attempted to revive the onward movement. On the one hand, the more ancient of the traditional elements had acquired, by their constant and often repeated transmission, a prestige and authority which placed them above discussion; on the other, the legacy of admitted principles and processes was continually increasing, until it became a source of embarrassment to the artist, and of destruction to his liberty. When at last the decadence of the race had advanced so far that all initiative power and independence of thought had disappeared, the time arrived when convention was everything, like one of those elaborate rituals which regulate every word, and even gesture of the officiating priest. When Plato visited Egypt, the schools of sculpture were nothing more than institutions for teaching pupils, who were remarkable for docility and for dexterity of hand, to transmit to their successors an assemblage of precepts and receipts which provided for every contingency and left no room for the exercise of fancy or discretion.