more power to attract the eye of the spectator than the figures with their yellow draperies. If the Ninevite bricks had never been recovered, we should have been in danger of being led into error by the expressions employed by Ctesias in describing the pictures he saw at Babylon, on the walls of the royal city: “One saw there,” he says, “every kind of animal, whose images were impressed on the brick while still unburnt; _these figures imitated nature by the use of colour_.”[360] We cannot say whether the words we have italicised belong to the text of Ctesias, or whether they were added by Diodorus to round off the phrase. It is certain that they give a false notion of the painted decorations. Those to whom the latter were intrusted no more thought of imitating the real colours of nature than the artists to whom we owe the glazed tiles of the Turkish and Persian mosques. The latter, indeed, gave no place in their scheme of ornament to the figures either of men or animals, and in that they showed, perhaps, a finer taste. The lions and bulls of the friezes had no doubt their effect, but yet our intelligence receives some little shock in finding them deprived of their true colours, and presented to our eyes in a kind of travesty of their real selves. Things used as ornaments have no inalienable colour of their own; the decorative artist is free to twist his lines and vary his tints as he pleases; his work will be judged by the result, and so long as that is harmonious and pleasing to the eye nothing more is required. We are tempted, therefore, on the whole, to consider some of those slabs of faïence upon which nothing appears but certain ornamental lines and combinations, suggested by geometrical and vegetable forms but elaborated by his own unaided fancy, as the masterpieces of the Assyrian enameller. If he had resolutely persevered in this path he might perhaps have produced something worthy to be compared for grace and variety with the marvellous faïence of Persia. [Illustration] CHAPTER IV. THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS. § 1.--_Ceramics._